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ELLEN KEY
From a photograph
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The
Century of the Child
By
Ellen Key
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
XLbe 'Knicfietttocfiec pte00
1909
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Copyright^ 1909
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Ube 'Rnfchevboclier press, lUw fforft
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PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The present translation is from the German version of
Frances Maro, which was revised by the author herself.
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGB
I. The Right op the Child to Choose
His Parents 1
II. The Unborn Race and Woman^s
Work 63
III. Education 106
IV. Homelbssness 191
V. Soul Murder in the Schools . . 203
VI. The School op the Future . . 233
VII. Religious Instruction . . . 284
VIII. Child Labour and the Crimes op
Children 316
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The Century of the Child
CHAPTER I
THE BIGHT OF THE CHILD TO CHOOSE HIS
PAEENTS
Filled with sad memories or eager hopes,
people waited for the turn of the century, and
as the clock struck twelve, felt innumerable
undefined forebodings. They felt that the
new century would certainly give them only
one thing, peace. They felt that those who
are labouring to-day would witness no new
development in that process of change to which
they had consciously or unconsciously con-
tributed their quota.
The events at the turn of the century caused
the new century to be represented as a small
naked child, descending upon the earth, but
drawing himself back in terror at the sight of
a world bristling with weapons, a world in
which for the opening century there was not
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2 The Century of the Child
an inch of free ground to set one's foot upon.
Many people thought over the significance of
this picture; they thought how in economic
and in actual warfare all the lower pas-
sions of man were still aroused; how despite
all the tremendous development of civilisation
in the century just passed, man had not yet
succeeded in giving to the struggle for exist-
ence nobler forms. Certainly to the question
why this still is so, very diflFerent answers were
given. Some contented themselves with de-
claring, after consideration, that things must
remain just as they are, since human nature
remains the same; that hunger, the propaga-
tion of the race, the desire for gold and power,
will always control the course of the world.
Others again were convinced that if the teach-
ing which has tried in vain for nineteen hun-
dred years to transform the course of the world
could one day become a living reality in the
souls of men, swords would be tinned into
pruning hooks.
My conviction is just the opposite. It is
that nothing will be diflFerent in the mass ex-
cept in so far as human nature itself is trans-
formed, and that this transformation will take
place, not when the whole of humanity be-
comes Christian, but when the whole of hu-
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The Choice of Parents 3
manity awakens to the consciousness of the
"hoUness of generation." This conscious-
ness will make the central work of society the
new race, its origin, its management, and its
education; about these all morals, all laws, all
social arrangements will be grouped. This
will form the point of view from which all
other questions will be judged, all other regu-
lations made. Up to now we have only heard
in academic speeches and in pedagogical es-
says that the training of youth is the highest
function of a nation. In reality, in the family,
in the school, and in the state, quite other
standards are put in the foreground.
The new view of the "holiness of genera-
tion" will not be held by mankind until it
has seriously abandoned the Christian point
of view and taken the view, bom thousands of
years ago, whose victory has been first fore-
shadowed in the century just completed.
The thought of development not only
throws light on the course of the world that
lies behind us, continued through millions of
years, with its final and highest point in man;
it throws light, too, on the way we have to
travel over; it shows us that we physically and
psychically are ever in the process of becom-
ing. While earlier days regarded man as a
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4 The Century of the Child
fixed phenomenon, in his physical and psychi-
cal relations, with qualities that might be
perfected but could not be transformed, it is
now known that he can re-create himself. In-
stead of a fallen man, we see an incompleted
man, out of whom, by infinite modifications in
an infinite space of time, a new being can come
into existence. Almost every day brings new
information about hitherto unsuspected pos-
sibilities; tells us of power extended physically
or psychically. We hear of a closer recipro-
cal action between the external and internal
world; of the mastery over disease, of the
prolongation of life and youth; of increased
insight into the laws of physical and psychical
origins. People even speak of giving incur-
able blind men a new kind of capacity of sight,
of being able to call back to life the dead; all
this and much else which it must be allowed
still belongs simply to the region of hypo-
thesis, to what psychical and physical investi-
gators reckon among possibilities. But there
are enough great results analysed already to
show that the transformations made by man
before he became a human being are far from
being the last word of his genesis. He who
declares to-day that himian nature always re-
mains the same, that is, remains just as it did
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The Choice of Parents 5
in those petty thousands of years in which our
race became conscious of itself, shows in mak-
ing this statement that he stands on the same
level of reflection as an ichthyosaurus of the
Jura period, that apparently had not even
an intimation of man as a possibility of the
future.
But he who knows that man has become
what he now is under constant transforma-
tions, recognises the possibility of so influen-
cing his future development that a higher type
of man will be produced. The human will is
found to be a decisive factor in the production
of the higher types in the world of animal and
plant life. With what concerns our own race,
the improvement of the type of man, the en-
nobling of the human race, the accidental still
prevails in both exalted and lower forms. But
civilisation should make man conscious of an
end and responsible in all these spheres where
up to the present he has acted only by impulse,
without responsibility. In no respect has cul-
ture remained more backward than in those
things which are decisive for the formation of
a new and higher race of mankind.
It will take the thorough influence of the
scientiflc view of himianity to restore the full
naive conviction, belonging to the ancient
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6 The Century of the Child
world, of the significance of the body. In the
later period of antiquity, in Socrates and
Plato, the soul began to look down upon the
body. The Renaissance tried to reconcile the
two but the eflFort was unfortunately not seri-
ous enough. Boldness it did not lack, but its
eflFort was not successful in carrying out a
task which Goethe himself said must be ap-
proached both with boldness and with serious
purpose. Only now that we know how soul
and body together build up or undermine one
another, people are beginning to demand again
a second higher innocence in relation to the
holiness and the rights of the body.
A Danish writer has shown how the Mosaic
Seventh Commandment sinks back into no-
thing, as soon as one sees that marriage is only
an accidental social form for the living together
of two people, while the ethically decisive fac-
tor is the way they live together. In morality
there is taking place a general displacement
from objective laws of direction and compul-
sion to the subjective basis from which actions
proceed. Ethics become an ethic of character,
a matter dealing with the constitution of the
temperament. We demand, we forgive, or we
judge according to the inner constitution of
the individual; we do not readily call an action
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The Choice of Parents 7
immoral which only in an external point of
view does not harmonise with the law or is op-
posed to the law. In each particular case we
decide according to the inner circmnstances of
the individual. Applying this point of view
to marriage, we find in the first place that this
from oflFers no guarantee that the proper dis-
position towards the relation of the two sexes
is present. This can exist as well outside of
as within marriage. Many noble and earnest
himian beings prefer for their relation the
freer form as the more moral one. But as the
result of this, the significance of the Seventh
Commandment is altered, that states ex-
plicitly that every relationship of sex outside
of marriage is immoral. People have com-
menced already to experiment with imions
outside of marriage. People are looking for
new forms for the common life between man
and woman. The whole problem Is being
made the subject of debate.
In this respect humanity occupies a field of
discovery. People are seeing more and more
what a comphcated subject the whole relation
of sex is, how full it is of dangers to the hap-
piness of man. New observations are being
constantly made both in regard to the signifi-
cance of this relation for individuals and for
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8 The Century of the Child
posterity. To bring light gradually into this
chaos is supremely important for humanity,
and literature should therefore have the great-
est possible freedom in this sphere, — ^just the
opposite to the tendencies of the present day
that would limit this freedom. While I fully
agree with what has been said I should like to
state that the greatest obstacle to the free dis-
cussion of this theme is still the Christian way
of looking at the origin and nature of man.
His only possible escape from the results of
the fall is made to consist in his belief in Christ ;
for with this point of view, there came into
Western Europe, by means of Christianity,
the opinion that everything concerning the con-
tinuation of the race was impure; to be sup-
pressed if possible, and if this could not be
done, that it must at least be veiled in silence
and obscurity. For Christianity, eternal life,
not life in the world, is ever the significant
factor. The dualism of existence it tries in
the first place to remove by asceticism, not by
attempting to ennoble the life of himian im-
pulses. This standpoint still continues to
be popular in our days, as is shown in its
victories through legislation directed against
the nude in art and in Uterature.
The Christian way of looking at the relation
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The Choice of Parents 9
of the sexes as something ignoble, alone capable
of being made holy by indissoluble marriage,
has had great direct influence on man's de-
velopment during a certain period of time.
It has caused progress in self-mastery, which
has elevated the life of the soul. Modesty,
domesticity, sincerity, have been promoted by
it; these along with innumerable other in-
fluences have developed the impulse to love.
If these emotions disappeared from love, it
would not be himian, but only animal.
But allowing that the individual love be-
tween every new pair of human beings always
requires seclusion and reserve; allowing too
that personal modesty always remains an
achievement wrought by mankind, differen-
tiating man from the animal world, it is still
true that this kind of spirituality, which passes
over in silence and shame all the serious ques-
tions connected with this subject, or treats
them us occasions for ambiguities calling
forth joking and blushes, must be rooted
out.
Each one from earliest childhood should
on every question asked about this subject
receive honest answers, suitable for the es-
pecial stage of his development. One should
be in this way completely enlightened about
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lo The Century of the Child
one's own nature as man or woman, and so
acquire a deep feeling of responsibility in re-
lation to one's future duty as man or woman.
One should be trained in habits of earnest
thought and earnest speaking on this subject.
In this way alone can there come into exist-
ence a higher type of sex with a higher type
of morality.
But at the time when Bjoemsen in Thomas
Rendelen brought up the question of train-
ing youth to purity through intelligence of
nature's laws, I objected to his book on the
ground that like the purity sermons of Chris-
tianity his efforts were rather directed to the
mastery of natural impulses than towards
their ennoblement. I showed that Bjoemsen
certainly brought up two new points of view,
that of bodily health, and that of the en-
nobling of sex. He did not, as Christianity
does, stress the spiritual and personal side of
the question. These new points of view of
his were significant, because they united the
just egoism of the individual with the com-
bining altruism produced by the feeling of
solidarity. The great purpose of Bjoemsen's
book was to transform inherited character-
istics as they are related to man's attitude
towards morality. So he proposed to create
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The Choice of Parents n
a sound and happy new generation, in which
the suflFerings of present day sexual discord
should be brought to an end. For this pur-
pose he wished the collaboration of the schools.
They were to communicate the knowledge of
himian beings as members of sex, and to in-
struct their scholars how, as human beings,
they should protect themselves and their
posterity.
I objected at that time to this plan, showing
that the school was not the place to lay the
foundation for such knowledge. It should
be slowly and carefully communicated by the
mother herself; the school should only give
a theoretical basis. More defective still, I
found the question of chastity handled essen-
tially and solely as a question of bodily purity,
as a negative not a positive ideal. I main-
tain that only erotic idealism could awaken
enthusiasm for chastity. The basis for such
idealism must be found in stories, history,
and belles-lettres. Information derived from
physiology is, in this respect, very inadequate,
unless the imagination and the feeling are
moved in the same direction. Neither imagina-
tion nor feeling can be helped by natural
science and bodily exercises alone, and just
as little by Christian religious instruction.
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12 The Century of the Child
No, we must on the basis of natural science
attain, in a newer and nobler form, the whole
antique love for bodily strength and beauty,
the whole antique reverence for the divine
character of the continuation of the race,
combined with the whole modem conscious-
ness of the soulful happiness of ideal love.
Only so can the demand for real chastity
save mankind from the torments which sex-
ual divisions and degradations now bring
with them. It is profoundly significant that
in the world of the past, divinity was asso-
ciated with woman on the ground of observar
tions concerning the continuation of the race;
while in Christianity, woman became divine
as the Virgin Mother. Through heathen and
Christian thought, reunited and ennobled, the
woman will receive a new re^cerence for her-
self as a sexual being. Antique and modern
love, the love of the senses and the love of
soul, wiD, united and ennobled, induce human
beings, men and women alike, to adore again
Eros the All-powerful.
To diminish the significance of love, to
oppose it as a lowering sensualism, does not
mean the elevation of mankind; it means, on
the other hand, working for its debasement.
For as lowering as sexual life would be if it
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The Choice of Parents 13
were continued in man accompanied by a feel-
ing of shame as a characteristic of animal Ufe,
it would be just the same if it were regarded
as a degrading duty, reluctantly carried out
for the preservation of the species.
Antiquity stood higher than the present day,
for example when Lycurgus' laws asserted
that a people's strength lies in the breast
of blooming womanhood. Accordingly in
Sparta, the physical development of the
woman was watched over as well as of the man,
and the age of marriage was determined with
reference to a healthy oflFspring. Higher,
too, stood Judaism in relation to the con-
ception of the seriousness of bearing children.
This conviction expressed itself in the strict-
est hygienic legislation known to history.
Jewish, like other Oriental legislation, de-
pended, in relation to sexual morality as in
relation to diet, on sharp-sighted observations
of natural law and disease. The foundation
to a new ethic in these questions cannot be
laid, until men begin with Old Testament
shrewdness and Old Testament seriousness to
handle the life questions which the idealism
of Christianity has indeed spiritualised but at
the same time debased.
This new ethic will call no other common
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14 The Century of the Child
living of man and woman immoral, except
that which gives occasion to a weak off-
spring, and produces bad conditions for the
development of their oflFspring. The Ten
Commandments on this subject will not be
prescribed by the founders of religion, but by
scientists.
Up to the present day, partly as a result
of a perverted modesty in such things, science
has only been able to offer incomplete observa-
tions on the physical and psychical conditions
for the improvement of the human type in
its actual genesis.
Ontogeny is really a new science in our
century, introduced by Von Leeuwenhock, de
Graaf, and others. It was founded in 1827,
by von Baer. The differences of opinion
and the discovery of different theories are
very far from being ended. Purely scientific
points of view are being combined with social,
physiological, or ethical ones. It is main-
tained that by changing the diet of the mother
the sex of the child can be determined. At-
tempts have been made to show that about
three fifths of all men of genius were first-
born children.
People are studying what influence the age
pf parents has on the child; extreme youth of
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The Choice of Parents 15
parents seems unfavourable for the offsprmg
as well as extreme age. The first child of a
too youthful mother is often weak, and be-
sides ordinarily the joys of motherhood are
not desired, because she feels that physically
and psychically a child is too great a burden to
her, who herself is only a child. The con-
ditions of a strong, well-nourished offspring
require the postponement of the marriage
age for women. In northern countries it
should be established, if not by law at least
by custom, at about twenty years. This is all
the more necessary because then the young
woman can have behind her some years of
careless youthful joy, an undisturbed self -de-
velopment, and will also have reached the phy-
sical development necessary for motherhood.
While twenty years should be regarded as the
earliest period of marriage it should actually
be often postponed some years still for the
well-being of the woman, the man, and the
children, and married life as a whole, in which
most conflicts arise because women have de-
cided about their fate before their personality
was definitely formed, before their heart was
able to find its choice. The love of the man
chooses and the young girl often confuses the
happiness of being loved with the happiness of
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1 6 The Century of the Child
loving, an experience which later on is gone
through in a tragic way. To the many ques-
tions which are related to heredity and natural
selection, belongs one which notices the signifi-
cance of nature's purpose to cause strong
opposites to exert upon one another the strong-
est attraction. This attraction often during
married life changes into antipathy; it almost
results in impatience against the character-
istics which originally had so deep an attrac-
tion. Nature in this case seems to wish to
reach its end with the greatest lack of con-
sideration for the happiness of the individual.
So often the contradictions of parents seem
really to be moulded in full in the child.
Occasionally these contradictions are expressed
as a deep discord, but in both cases there often
arises an exceptional being. To attain cor-
rect results in this case, belongs to the nimier-
ous still open possibilities.
Differences of opinion are most apparent
in the theory of heredity, where there is a
struggle between Darwin's view, that even
acquired characteristics are inherited, and
Galton's and Weissmann's conviction that this
is not the case. In connection with this
stands, also, the question of the marriage of
consanguineous relations; some regard these
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The Choice of Parents 17
marriages as dangerous, per se, for the pos-
terity; others only as dangerous from the pomt
of view that the same family trait is often
found in both parents, and so becomes strongly
impressed on the children. For example, con-
genital shortsightedness of both parents de-
velops into blindness of the children, their
stupidity becomes idiocy, their melancholy,
insanity.
The Occident has gradually abolished the
Oriental marriage law to which Moses gave
validity, while other Oriental legislators, for
example. Manes and Mohammed, are still
followed to a great extent. In China, too,
similar prohibitions have a binding power.
Here and there the feeling of the significance
of heredity has vaguely appeared in some
Occidental writers. Sir Thomas More, like
Plato, required a physical examination before
entering into marriage. It was not until the
nineteenth century that the question of the
rights of the child in this respect began to
be noticed. It was Robert Owen who in one
way awakened the general right feeling in
favour of children, by investigations begun in
1815. They showed that children under eight
years old were forced to work by blows from
leather whips, to work from fifteen to sixteen
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i8 The Century of the Child
hours a day, with the result that a fourth or
fifth of them ended as cripples. Another
Englishman, Malthus, puhUshed in 1798 an
essay on the Principle of Population, and
directed the attention of society to the con-
ditions which had caused him to write his
work. He pointed to the deficiency of food
supply produced hy over-population and the
obstacles it offered to legitimate marriages.
Again, these conditions, he showed, resulted
partly in great mortality among children,
partly in the murder of children. Malthus
saw the significance of selection and the dan-
ger of degeneration. With perfect calmness
of conscience he met the storm he had evoked.
Personally a blameless and tender hearted
man, Malthus, as all other reformers of moral
ideas, had to allow the shameless accusations of
corruption and immorality to pass over his
head. Harriet Martineau, who advocated Mal-
thus's views, had the same experience. When
she wrote her novels on this subject she knew
very well to what she was exposing herself; but
this remarkable woman, who died unmarried
and childless, was at an early period of her
life filled with a feeling for the holiness of
the child. When nineteen years old, at the
time of the birth of a small sister, she fell on
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The Choice of Parents 19
her knees and devoutly thanked Grod that she
had been allowed to be the witness of the
great wonder of the development of the hu-
man being from the beginning. The same
feeling caused her in her novels to expound
the duty of voluntary limitation of population.
She was pained by the thought of the fate
endured by children, when they were so nu-
merous that their parents were unable to
maintain and educate them. This part of the
subject of the right of the child called forth
in all countries books for and against it.
Everywhere the question is discussed. I shall
briefly handle the differences of opinion about
other sides of the right of the child.
In Francis Galton's celebrated work.
Hereditary Genius, almost all has been said
that is required to-day from the point of view
of the improvement of the race. Galton, as
early as the seventies, opposed Darwin's view
that acquired characteristics were inherited.
In this respect he had a fellow-champion in
the German Weissmann, who on his side was
opposed, among others, by the English Dar-
winian Romanes.
Galton invented from a Greek word a name
for the science of the amelioration of the race,
Eugenics. He showed that civilised man, so
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20 The Century of the Child
far as care for the amelioration of the race
is concerned, stands on a much lower plane
than savages, not to speak of Sparta which
did not allow the weak, the too young, and
the too old to marry, and where national
pride in a piu^ race, a strong offspring, was
so great that individuals were sacrificed to the
attainment of this end. Galton, like Darwin,
Spencer, A. R. Wallace, and others, has
brought out the fact that the law of natural
selection, which in the rest of nature has se-
cured the survival of the fittest, is not
applicable to himian society, where economic
motives lead to unsuitable marriagesi, made
possible by wealth. Poverty hinders suitable
marriages. Besides the development of sym-
pathy has come into the field as a factor which
disturbs natural selection. The sympathy of
love, chooses according to motives that cer-
tainly tend to the happiness of the individual,
but this does not mean that they guarantee
the improvement of the race. And while
other writers hope for a voluntary abstinence
from marriage in those cases, where an in-
ferior offspring is to be expected, Galton, on
the other hand, is in favour of very strict rules,
to hinder inferior specimens of himianity from
transmitting their vices or diseases, their in-
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The Choice of Parents 21
tellectual or physical weaknesses. Just because
Galton does not believe in the inheritance of
acquired characteristics, selection has the great-
est significance for him.
On the other side, he advocates using all
means to encourage such marriages, where
the family on both sides gives promise of
distinguished offspring. For him, as later
for Nietzsche, the purpose of married life
is the production of strong, able person-
aUties.
Galton makes it plain that civilised man,
by his sympathy with weak, inefficient in-
dividuals, has helped to continue their ex-
istence. This tendency on its own side has
lessened the possibility of the efficient indi-
viduals to continue the species. Wallace, too,
and several others, have on different occasions
declared that men in relation to this question
must have harder hearts, if the himian race
is not to become inferior. The moral, social,
and sympathetic factors, they say, which in
humanity work against the law of the survival
of the fittest, and have made it possible for
the lower type, to continue and to multiply in
excess, must give way to new points of view
where certain moral and social questions are
concerned. So the natural law will be sup-
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2 2 The Century of the Child
ported by altruism, instead of as now being
opposed by this sentiment.
Spencer's thoughts contain a great truth.
They have been quoted in just this connection.
He says: We see the germ of many things
that later on are developed in a way no one
now suspects. Profoimd transformations are
worked in society and its members, trans-
formations which we could not have hoped
for as immediate results, but which we could
have looked for in confidence as final conse-
quences. The effort to find natural laws
which cause racial progress or deterioration
is one of these germinal ideas. As to scien-
tific investigation in this field, we can ap-
ply another maxim of the same thinker, one
often overlooked by science. " The passion to
discover truth must be accompanied by the pas-
sion to use it for the welfare of mankind.'*
But science must really reach imiversally ac-
cepted conclusions before we can expect hu-
manity to begin seriously its self -purification;
but it is certain to come then. When we read
in ethnographical and sociological works what
restrictions in marriage are imposed by savage
people on themselves, and religiously obeyed
on the ground of superstitious prejudice, we
have a right to hope that civilised men will
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The Choice of Parents 23
one day bow before scientific proofs. This
hope is not too optimistic.
Wallace pleads not for such absolute regu-
lations as Galton, in order to prevent the mar-
riages of the less worthy and to encourage
the marriages of the superior types of hu-
manity. He perceives that the problem is
tremendously complicated. One thing is, that
the personal attraction of love is extremely
essential from the point of view of the im-
provement of the race. If himian beings
could be bred like prize cattle, it is not likely
that a superior type of himianity would be
produced. In the Middle Ages, the human
race deteriorated, Galton said, because the
best fled to the monasteries and the worst
reproduced themselves. But if Galton's strict
requirements had to be carried out in every
case before a marriage could be allowed, not
only would marriage lose its deepest mean-
ing, but the race also would lose its noblest
inheritance.
But even with a strict limitation of Gal-
ton's principles and with a wise limitation of
his requirements, science has already shown
the truth of so many of the first, that the
significance of the last, taken as a whole, must
be granted. We know that in the inherited
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24 The Century of the Child
tendencies of children, often another form is
taken from that which appears in their parents.
Of three hundred idiots, one hundred and
forty-five had alcoholic parents. Epilepsy,
too, is often produced by the same cause. It
is known that apparently sound individuals
are often attacked at the same age by a dis-
ease to which their parents were subject. On
the other hand, there are fortamately proofs
that individuals endowed with power of will
can resist certain dangerous inherited weak-
nesses. In the discussion on this subject, it
should also be justly brought out, that it is
possible for the unsound tendency of one
parent to be neutralised in the case of chil-
dren, by the soundness of the other. But
this result, as well as the many other questions
involved, as I have shown above, are far
from being established.
The question as to the inheritance of men-
tal diseases has been especially examined by
Maudsley. In this case, too, nervous and
psychic diseases of the parents often change
their character in the children. He requires
medical testimony before marriage, and asks
that the appearance of mental diseases after
marriage shall form a legitimate ground for
divorce. And he hopes that a pure descent.
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The Choice of Parents 25
in a new sense of the word, will be as im-
portant for the marriages of the future, as
for aristocratic marriages in early times. One
of Maudsley's statements is so interesting that
it should be mentioned here. Fathers, he says,
who have directed their whole energy towards
attainment of wealth, have degenerate chil-
dren; for this sort of nerve strain undermines
the system as infallibly as alcohol or opium.
If this statement be true, we would add an-
other point of view to the many already
existent, that show how hostile to life is our
best social order, which aims at power and
gain. It proves how necessary is that trans-
formation of existence which will make work
and production serve a new end. Each man
should claim to live wholly, broadly, and in a
way worthy of humanity. He should be able
to leave behind him a posterity provided with
all capacities for a similar life. When this
day dawns people will regard, as a terrible
atavism, that expression on the face of a child,
which an artist of the present day has pre-
served in a picture of a boy represented as a
future millionaire.
I will mention now from literary sources,
some of Nietzsche's work on this subject.
Although this author did not base his ideas
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26 The Century of the Child
of the " superman " directly on Darwin's theo-
ries, yet they are, as Brandes has lately shown,
the great consequences of Darwinism, that
Darwin himself did not see. In no con-
temporary was there a stronger conviction
than in Nietzsche that man as he now is, is
only a bridge, only a transition between the
animal and the "superman/* In connection
with this, Nietzsche looked upon the obliga-
tions of man for the amelioration of the race
as seriously as Galton, but he expressed his
principles with the power of poetic and pro-
phetic expression, not with scientific proof.
Literature on this subject is increasing
every day; different opinions press one an-
other hard. As long as this is the case, there
is every reason to observe the warning of
the Grerman sociologist Kurella, who says that
we must reckon with social as well as with
anthropological factors if we wish to prevent
the degeneration of the human species. A
vital point in his position is, that it is a matter
of indifference whether the Darwinian theory
of the transmission of acquired characteristics,
or its contrary is victorious. The former is
the theory of an unchangeable germ plasm
transmitted by the parents to the children; so
that better types can only originate through
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The Choice of Parents 27
a new combination of the characteristics of
father and mother, and also by natural selec-
tion in the struggle for existence. We must
be careful before beginning to act in a social
and political way on the basis of anthropo-
logical motives. He finally lays down with
perfect justice, that the material to be gath-
ered from the works of Spencer, Galton,
Lombroso, Ferri, Ribot, Latourneau, Have-
lock Ellis, J. B. Haycraft, Colajanni, Sergi,
Ritchie, and others, must be systematically
worked over. The sociologist must be zo-
ologist, anthropologist, and psychologist be-
fore his plans for civilising man, and for
elevating the himian race could be carried
out.
As to intellectual characteristics it has been
maintained that exceptionally gifted men have
mostly inherited their characteristics from the
mother. This fact has in our day, so very
much increased the interest taken in the
mothers of famous men. This truth is sup-
posed to hold good for a son, but if the
daughter is gifted, her talent is held to come
from the father. Another and certainly a
better founded phenomenon seems to be this:
That when in a family characteristics find their
culmination in a world genius, this genius
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28 The Century of the Child
either remains childless or his children are not
only ordinary, but often insignificant. It may
be that nature has exhausted her power of
production in these great personalities, or as is
often assumed, the creative power of genius
in an intellectual direction, diminishes the
creative power in the physical direction.
Along with the question of heredity stands
that of the development of races. In the
beginning of the Origin of Species Darwin
showed how essential pure descent is for the
production of a noble race. This theory is
appealed to by a modem anti-Semitic writer,
who represents the Jew as a typical example
of pure race, an idea which one of the
most conspicuous representatives of Judaism,
Disraeli, has also expressed in the following
words: "Race is everything; there is no
other truth, and every race which carelessly
allows mixed blood, perishes." Yet other
specialists consider some racial mixture as
highly advantageous to the offspring.
Professor Westermark has offered a good
reason for the significance attached to beauty
in the case of love, and therefore its importance
for the race. He has shown how man has
conceived physical beauty to be the full devel-
opment of all of those characteristics which
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The Choice of Parents 29
distinguish the human organism from the ani-
mal, and which mark sex distinctions, and,
most of all, race distinctions. He thinks indi-
viduals with these characteristics are hest suited
for their life work. Accordingly it is the re-
sult of natural selection that exactly those
individuals are found most beautiful and are
most desired, who first as human beings
best fulfil the general demands of the hu-
man organism, as sexual beings fulfil those
of their sex, and as members of the race
are best suited to the conditions which sur-
roimd them. In the struggle for existence,
those are overcome, who are descended from
human beings, whose instincts of love are
directed to individuals badly adapted to that
struggle; while those who are victorious are
children happily so adapted. In this way,
taste has developed by which, what is best
adapted to environment appears as the highest
beauty. This is equivalent to health, the
power to resist the attacks of the external
world. While every considerable deviation
from the pure type in sex and race, has a
lesser degree of adaptability; that is of health,
and also of beauty.
Another writer has used the foot as an
example of this principle. The small, high-
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30 The Century of the Child
arched foot with the fine ankle is always, he
says, regarded as the most beautiful. But such
a foot is only combined with a fine, strong, and
elastic bony structure. Such a foot besides
has, by its great elasticity, a considerably
higher power of bearing weight than the flat
foot. The high-vaulted foot, in walking and
jumping, increases the activity of the limgs
and the heart. This again makes the walk
elastic, strong, and easy, agile and stately.
These traits, for the same reason as the
beauty of the foot itself, are looked upon as
a racial sign. This physical power and ease
influence the mind, and produce self-confi-
dence, and so increase the feeling of superiority
and the joy of living, marks of distinction
in human beings.
Whether the illustration in this special case
holds good or not, it proves nothing against
the truth of the theory on which it rests, and
which is gradually becoming prevalent; the
view I mean, according to which souls and
bodies are mutually developed through adapt-
ability to their surroundings.
So it is necessary not only to investigtite
what conditions give the best selection, but
also what external ones strengthen or weaken
the characteristics found in natural selection.
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The Choice of Parents 31
We must again see the importance of bodily
exercise. Painful experiences have taught us
to prevent the consequences of overstrain,
over-exertion in competitive imbecility, and
mania for sport. Such results have specially
shown themselves to be harmful for women
in respect to motherhood. Sport and play,
gymnastics and pedestrianism, life in nature
and in the open air, a regenerated system of
dancing, after the model of the Swedish peas-
ant dances, will be most excellent bases for
the physical and psychical renewal of the new
generation.
In plans concerning this renewal, people
have pointed to the influence of art; it has
been shown how Bume- Jones created the new
English type of woman. It was formed by
an adaption to the quiet, distinguished style,
by a process that went slowly on. This was
the type regarded by him as the model one.
It is maintained that we only need to see a
pair of young English girls in front of one
of his pictures, in order to notice how not
only the faces but the expressions show a re-
semblance. The artist has impressed his
trait on youth before it was conscious of it.
OBefore these forms they grew up, they have
seen them in their picture books, they have
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32 The Century of the Child
been dressed in clothes cut in the fashion of
the master's pictures. There is another rea-
son. Mothers of the present day are supposed
to have passed on to their children the Bume-
Jones type in the same way in which the
charm of the Greeks was influenced by the
beauty of their statuary. In antiquity it was
believed, even in other details, (for example,
in attaining the much-longed-for blonde hair)
that this end could be secured by observing
the proper directions.
As to the significance of external influences
of this kind on mothers, there is too little
material still to build up conclusions. On
this point, learned men also disagree. I have
only, therefore, incidentally mentioned this
factor among others. All should be estab-
lished before we can get a final and certain
insight into the conditions of human birth.
In the absence of scientific knowledge I can
only refer to the literature and comprehensive
investigations conmienced in the preceding
century, that throw Ught on the riddle of
man's coming into the world. Many of these
matters are still involved in obscurity. But
man's spirit is resting on the waters; gradually
a new creation will be called forth from
them.
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The Choice of Parents 33
In connection with this, must he discussed
the development of new ideas of law in these
spheres. Heathen society in its hardness, ex-
posed weak or crippled children. Christian
society on the other hand, has gone so far in
its mildness, that it prolongs the life of the
child who is incurably ill, physically and psy-
chically, even if he is misshapen and so be-
comes an hourly torment to himself and his
surroimdings. Yet respect for life is still not
strong enough in a social order, which keeps
up among other things, the death penalty and
war, that one can without danger suggest the
extinction of such a life. Only when death
is inflicted through compassion, will the hu-
manity of the future show itself in such a
way, that the doctor under control and re-
sponsibility can painlessly extinguish such
suffering. On the other hand, this Christian
society still maintains the distinction between
legitimate children and the children of sin, a
distinction which more than anything else has
helped to obstruct a real ethical conception of
the duties of parents. Every child has the
same rights in respect to both father and
mother. Both parents have just the same ob-
ligation to every child. Until this is recog-
nised there will be no basis for the future
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34 The Century of the Child
morality of the common life between man and
woman. Some day society will look upon the
arrangements of the love relation as tiie pri-
vate affair of responsible individuals. Those
who are lovers, those who are married will
regard themselves as completely free, and will
also be so regarded. Binding promises in
respect of emotions, demands of exclusive
possession over personality, have already come
to be regarded by fine feeling and fully de-
veloped human beings as a relic of erotic sen-
timents on a lower plane. These sentiments
were the outcome of desire for mastery, vanity,
cruelty, and blind passion. People are begin-
ning to see that perfect fidelity is only to be
obtained by perfect freedom; that complete
exchange of individuality can only take place
in perfect freedom; that complete excellence
can only come into being in perfect freedom.
Each must cease to try to force and bend the
emotions, opinions, habits, and inclinations of
the other towards him- or herself. Each must
regard the continuance of the feeling of the
other as a happiness, not as a right. Each
must regard the possible cessation of this feel-
ing as a pain, not as an injustice. Only in
this way can there arise between the two
souls such pure, full, freedom that both can
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The Choice of Parents 35
move with absolute independence, and com-
plete unity.
Freedom is no danger to fidelity. The kind
of fidelity required by the church and by the
law has certainly been a notable means of
education. But the method, as it is, is op-
posed to the end. For it has produced the
feeling of possession. This has led to loss of
respect in the worship of love. The require-
ments based on force have awakened hostility
in soul and sense; the fear of public opinion
has produced all sorts of dishonesty between
man and wife, between them and the world.
When the bonds of compulsion fall away feel-
ing will be strengthened. For when the ex-
ternal supports of fidelity are wanting, the
power required for it will come from the inner
life. Although human beings will be exposed
always to the possibility of serious mistakes
about themselves and the object of their love;
although time can always change human be-
ings and their emotions; although, even in a
marriage which has resulted from mutual love,
conditions can arise which make Nietzsche^s
ideal legitimate, that it is better to break up
the marriage than to be broken up by it; yet
on the whole freedom will encourage fidelity,
which itjself will always have a support through
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36 The Century of the Child
the experience of its psychological and ethical
value.
It is not through a series of lightly entered
into and Ughtly dissolved connections that one
is prepared for the happiness of great love.
Voluntary fideUty is a sign of nobility, be-
cause it assumes the will to concentrate about
the centre of hfe^s meaning; because it sig-
nifies the unity with our own proper inner-
most ego. This is as true of fideUty in love
as of all other kinds of fidelity. Only when
love is the practical religion of the work-day,
and the devotion of the hoUday, when it is
kept under the constant supervision of the
soul, when it brings with it a constant growth,
why should not the fine old word "sanctifi-
cation" be used) of personality, is love great.
Then it comes into possession of a higher
right than some earlier union, because it then
means really fidelity and nothing else to-
wards our own highest ego. But where it
does not have this character, it does not pos-
sess this right. It is then a petty emotion
even when it is made pardonable by great
passion. The children which issue from tem-
porary unions are often as imperfect as their
origin. Great love is, as a young doctor once
said, only that which grips so deeply, that
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The Choice of Parents 37
after its loss one no longer feels as a whole,
but as a half of a whole. Yet nature has
protected itself against annihilation by giving
the possibiUty of love more than once. But
what nature's ideal is cannot be doubted. The
race which would come into existence, pro-
vided young men and women were given the
possibility of uniting when the first love took
possession of them, — ^that love which is the
deepest, — ^this race would be soimd and strong,
different from what our own race is now.
But when yoimg people love now they seldom
have the means for imion, and when they have
the means, then that which leads them to the
marriage imion is not the deepest feeling they
have ever felt, but only an impulse, which,
even if real, is still only a substitute.
Such a transformation of the conditions of
society and of the individual view of the true
worth of life will enable young men and wo-
men, between the ages of twenty and thirty, to
found their own home and under simple con-
ditions, to secure their happiness. Here would
be one of the most essential foundations for
the origin of a new race, which would have
the ancient feeling for the hearth as an altar,
and would have the life of love as the service
of a divinity. Only through such a trans-
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38 The Century of the Child
formation might it be expected that the
deepest misery of society, prostitution, could be
restrained. Only after such a transformation
could we with full right require from our
youth that self-mastery which is the best pre-
condition of the sound development of the
new generation.
As things are at present, it is certain that
just as there are really immoral, immarried
mothers, so there are others deeply moral,
who would be mothers with a great pure love
to the father of their child, but who for vari-
ous reasons should not be united with them in
legal marriage. And even if the contraction
of marriage were simplified, such mother-
hood on the part of single women, should
continue to exist.
Bjoernsen, when he gave lectiu'es in Nor-
way on sexual morality, maintained the view
that the woman who wished for motherhood,
but who was not adapted in her opinion for
marriage, should be fully entitled to the first,
without the last being regarded as necessary,
on condition that she was willing to fulfiOl to
the child her maternal duties. This idea cer-
tainly has a future. In Germany there was
a well-known case in which a fully mature
woman, not a mere girl, saw shortly after
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The Choice of Parents 39
her marriage that the temperaments and con-
ditions of both parties to the marriage would
make it an imhappiness for both. She sepa-
rated, therefore, brought her child into the
world unmarried, educated it publicly and with
self-sacrifice. Now she has along with the
peace which comes from work and the happi-
ness of motherhood, the possibility of ful-
filling her duty also as daughter, while
married Ufe would have destroyed this for all
parties. This is one of the many cases out
of the great collection of life, that shows how
foolish is that requirement of society to press
himian nature, in its manifold types, into one
mould, with a sphere of duty arranged in the
same way for all.
But the sphere of duty, an ever-widening
one, is the sphere which embraces the right
of the child. Yet its lines will be drawn in
the future bounded in quite a different way
from now. It will then be looked upon as
the supreme right of the child that he shall
not be bom in a discordant marriage. Above
everything, therefore, marriage must be free.
This means that the two parties can freely
separate after mutual agreement. In enter-
ing into marriage and in dissolving it, only
certain duties towards the children are to be
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40 The Century of the Child
assumed. Such legal provisions might well
be superfluous even in this case; in others,
they might be important. But in none are
they to become an obstacle to the development
of this relation to the children. On the other
hand, the compulsory marriage laws of to-day,
as well in relation to divorce as to the guard-
ianship given the man, have become obstacles
to the higher development of the common Ufe
of man and woman.
The vigorous drawing together of the
bonds of marriage will not protect children
from growing up in a destroyed home. This
protection will be secured by deeper earnest-
ness in entering upon marriage, but above all
by a deeper sense of responsibility to the child-
ren themselves. This will make it possible
for the parents who see themselves deceived
in their married happiness to keep a peaceful
resignation, a high character, as they continue
to live together, if they feel that this is the
best solution of the conflict, for the children
who are already born. But this resolution
does not mean the continuance of real mar-
ried life, but parenthood alone. Only so can
it be really useful to the children that the
marriage should not be dissolved. The par-
ents, who are profoundly and finally ahem*
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The Choice of Parents 41
ated must not bestow life on any new being.
Marriages lightly entered into are many;
lightly entered into divorces are few, at least
where there are children. It is not the pre-
scriptions of the law, but those of blood which
work as a restraining influence here even at
the present day. The decisive sentence is not
spoken by society but by the children. But
these deep motives are just as decisive in the
case of a free union as in the case of a legal
one; if the father or the mother is only kept
with the children by compulsion, the children
have not much to lose. The important thing
for unwritten duties, duties which largely can
not be determined by law, is to awaken the
conscience of fathers and mothers in order to
create a better moraUty. Perhaps for this,
new legislation is necessary for the present.
Certainly antiquated legal conceptions should
be done away with; they have done good duty
as a past training for moraUty. Now they
stand in the way of the higher morality. The
man or the woman who plays the role of se-
duction, spoiling the life of a young woman
or a young man, or disturbing the peace of
a happy marriage, this type of character, is
being treated with ever-increasing contempt.
The more one learns to distinguish the heart-
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42 The Century of the Child
less play of masculine or feminine desire for
conquest, the selfish soulless claims of the
senses, from those of love, the^ore does the
conception of morality become equivalent to
the feeling of responsibility towards the new
generation.
The gratification of natural impulses, which
act contrary to the real profound intention
of nature, is what destroys individuals and
peoples. But as has been said, these devasta-
tions cannot be successfully restrained by the
extermination of man's material nature.
It is a favourable symptom when a poet
opposes the mastery of material nature, apart
from the feeling of responsibility. But it is
harmful when this sensuousness is made, as
Tolstoi does, equivalent to the conception of
love. Love must not be debased to simple
sensuousness, nor must it be etherealised to
a simple spiritual quality, if the human race
is to be freed from the debasing mastery of
impulse. This happens, as I have often shown
before, and in an earlier part of this work
as well, by the elevation of sensuousness to
love. I mean by this that the spiritual unity
of beings, the indulgence of tenderness, the
sympathy of souls, the community of work,
and the happiness of comr^^deship, will be as
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The Choice of Parents 43
really decisive factors in the lofty emotions
of love, and in the charm of love, as the at-
traction of the senses. This wealth in the
elements of mutual dependence is what keeps
fidelity in love both inwardly and outwardly.
This soft current of the soul's depths keeps
the sensuous charm fresh; while mere relation,
both legal marriage and free union, very soon
exhausts happiness and leaves behind ennui,
if love has contained only sensuous attraction,
and not that mutual feeling of dependence,
which involves the union of the soul and the
sense, and which imites the spirit and the
sympathies.
The duty and responsibility towards the
children will be all the more strict as society
learns to regard it as one of its principal
duties to hinder all thoughtless and undeserved
suffering.
The morality of the future will not be
found in sacrificing to the holiness of the
family so-called illegitimate children, who are
often by nature richly endowed, but who by
the prevailing legal system receive such treat-
ment, that they often become what they are
called, and so are filled with vengeance
against society and the perverse conceptions
of law whose victims they are. Child murder.
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44 The Century of the Child
phosphorous poisonings, " angel-making " — all
these are connected with these perverse legal
ideas. But all of these results are still less
pernicious than those which society draws
upon itself through those " disgraced " chil-
dren, who go to ruin not physically but
psychically. In them, there are not only
frequently good powers lost, but socially de-
structive powers developed. When the whole
of Europe shuddered over the murder of the
Empress Elizabeth, one fact above every
other seemed to me terrible. The murderer
confessed, " I know nothing of my parents."
The time will come in which the child will
be looked upon as holy, even when the par-
ents themselves have approached the mystery
of life with profane feelings; a time in which
all motherhood will be looked upon as holy,
if it is caused by a deep emotion of love, and
if it has called forth deep feelings of duty.
Then the child, who has received its life
from sound, loving human beings and has been
afterwards brought up wisely and lovingly,
will be called legitimate, even if its parents
have been united in complete freedom. Then
will the child, who has been born in a loveless
marriage, and has been burdened by the fault
of its parents with bodily or mental disease.
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The Choice of Parents 45
be regarded as illegitimate, even if its parents
have been united in marriage by the Pope
at St. Peter's. The shadow of contempt will
not fall on the immarried tender mother of a
radiantly healthy child, but on the legitimate
or illegitimate mother of a being made de-
generate by the misdeeds of its forefathers.
In a much discussed drama called The
lAon's Whelp, there occurs the following
dialogue between an older and younger man:
The Oldee Man: The next century will be the
century of the child, just as this century has been
the woman's century. When the child gets his
rights, morality will be perfected. Then every man
will know that he is bound to the life which he
has produced with other bonds, than those imposed
by society and the laws. You understand that a
man cannot be released from his duty as father
even if he travels around the world; a kingdom
can be given and taken away, but not fatherhood.
The Youth: I know this.
The Oldee Man: But in this all righteousness
is still not fulfilled — in man^s carefully preserving
the life which he has called into existence. No
man can early enough think over the other question,
whether and when he has the right to call life
into existence.
This dialogue has supplied me with a title
for this bookt It is the point of departure
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46 The Century of the Child
of my assertion, that the first right of the
child is to select its own parents.
What here must be first considered is the
thought constantly being brought out by
Darwinian writers, that the natural sciences,
in which must now be numbered psychology,
should be the basis of jiuistic science as well
as of pedagogy. Man must come to learn
the laws of natural selection and act in the
spirit of these laws. Man must arrange the
punishments of society in the service of devel-
opment; they must be protective measures
for natural selection. In the first place this
must be secured by hindering the criminal
type from perpetuating itself. The charac-
teristics of this type can only be determined
by specialists. But the criminal must be pre-
vented from handing on his characteristics to
his posterity.
So the human race will be gradually freed
from atavisms which reproduce lower and pre-
ceding stages of development. This is the
first condition of that evolution by which man-
kind will be able to let the ape and tiger die.
Then comes the requirement that those with
inherited physical or psychical diseases shall
not transmit them to an offspring.
As to this type of heredity opinions are
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The Choice of Parents 47
still very much divided. Great authorities
are in conflict with one another on the ques-
tion of tuberculosis. Some contend that it
is hereditary, others declare that it is only
transmitted by infection. Accordingly when
a child is born of a tuberculous mother, and
is taken away from her, there is no danger
for the child. Views are also divided on the
subject of cancer. Regarding other diseases,
however, there is complete certainty. Legis-
lation has already interfered in the case of
epilepsy, although the law in practice is not
always applied. But in the case of syphilis,
alcoholism, and many kinds of nervous com-
plaints, diseases which aflBict children most
certainly, in various ways, legislation has yet
done nothing.
There is an old axiom that we are obliged
to thank our parents for life. Our parents,
I know from my own experience, can them-
selves have been the heirs of bodily and mental
health, resulting from the fact that maternal
and paternal ancestors all made early, right,
and happy marriages. But generally, parents
must on their part, ask the children's pardon
for the children's existence.
It makes no difference, whether we talk with
people sunken in necessity or crime, or with
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48 The Century of the Child
those suffering from nervous and other dis-
eases, or finally with people who are spiritually
maimed. In most eases we are convinced that
the main cause of their condition as indicated
by them, goes back to their birth, or to the
time of their childish consciousness. Some-
times their parents have been too young or
too old, their fathers or mothers invalids.
Sometimes they are the offspring of intem-
perance. Again their mother may have been
overburdened by the torment of work, or by
a large family of children; or they may have
received their Hfe in marriages concluded
without love, or after the cessation of love.
They have been unwelcome, or born under
feelings of revulsion, bearing in their blood
the germ of discord or disgust of life. Nu-
merous abnormal tendencies, among them
misanthropy in women, can be traced back to
these causes. Finally they have been brought
up in a home where they have suffered from
the burden of bad examples, or conflicting
influences.
So strong has the conviction of the
meaning of heredity become that young
men, who have themselves borne a burden,
imposed by generations of one character
or another, have begun to see that it is
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The Choice of Parents 49
theu" duty rather to abstaui from marriage
than to transmit their mifortunate inherit-
enee to a new generation. I knew a woman
in whose family on her father's and mother's
side, mental disease was inherited. There-
fore, though healthy herself, she refused
to marry the man she loved. I know of an-
other who broke her engagement, because she
was convinced that the man whom she loved
was a drinker, and she did not want to give her
children such a father. It is especially on
this point that women sin in marrying from
ignorance, because they do not know that
epilepsy and other diseases, especially alcohol-
ism, are often caused because the child has
had a drunkard for a father. A young woman
could have no more certain test for the con-
tinuance of her feelings for a man, than
whether she feels exalted joy or tormenting
distress, at the thought of seeing his charac-
teristics transmitted to their child.
Men sin against the coming race not only
by excessive drinking, but in other respects
where the results are still more destructive.
Besides the conscience of men must begin
to awaken. This will express itself partly in
the requirement to abstain from marriage
when they know that they have to transmit
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a bad inheritance, partly in other spheres of
morahty as in the following examples:
A young man, himself a physician, thought
he was healthy when he married. He discov-
ered his mistake and f oimd himself confronting
the choice of wronging his wife or separating
from her. As they were deeply in love, the
only possible way was separation. He chose
death which he inflicted on himself in such a
way that his wife thought it was caused by
accident.
Another man acted in the same way after
he had been married several years and had
three children; he found out that he was his
wife's half-brother.
But these incidents as the one before men-
tioned, where women are concerned, are
notoriously only isolated examples. It will
require the development of several generations
before it will be the woman's instinct, an ir-
resistibly mastering instinct, to allow no
physically or psychically degenerated or per-
verted man to become the father of her chil-
dren. The instinct of the man is far stronger
in this direction, but it is dulled too by an
antiquated legal conception, according to
which the woman must subject herself as a
duty to requirements against which her whole
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The Choice of Parents 51
being revolts. In this respect a woman has
only one duty, an unmistakable one, against
which every transgression is a sin, namely
that the new being to which she gives life,
must be born in love and purity, in health and
beauty, in full mutual harmony, in a complete
coDMnon will, in a complete common happi-
ness. Until women see this as a duty, the
earth will continue to be peopled by beings,
who in a moment of their existence have been
robbed of the best pre-conditions of their Kfe's
happiness and their life's eflSciency. Occa-
sionally they show plainly at an early age the
sign of degeneration or of discord. Occasion-
ally they seem for a long time to be healthy
and powerful specimens of humanity, until
in some critical moment they go to pieces
through an insufficient supply of physical
and psychical vitality caused by their very
origin.
As to marriages between healthy and active
individuals, legislation can do nothing. Ethics
alone can exert an influence for betterment.
Children must be taught from their earliest
years about their existence and their futiu^
duties as men and women. So mothers and
fathers together can impress on the conscience
of the children not anj; abstract conception
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52 The Century of the Child
of purity, but the concrete conunandment of
chastity in letters of fire. So they will keep
their health, their attractiveness, their guile-
lessness, for the being they are to love; for
the children who from this love will receive
their life.
The impulse to preserve the species, it is
true, makes human beings low, small, or
laughable; as poets Uke Maupassant, Tolstoi,
and others have depicted from quite different
points of view; but it only does so when the
impulse appears without relation to the end
given it in nature, or when this end is attained
without consideration for the productiort of
an offspring qualified to live. The Jdnd of
love which disturbs life is that which dimin-
ishes the value of an individual as a creator
of life. This type of love really degrades
human beings, is immoral from the stand-
point of the modern view, which wiUs life to
be, but above all, wills the progress of life to
ever higher forms.
Young people must therefore learn to
reverence their future duties. These they al-
together miss, if they squander their spiritual
and bodily obligations, in unions formed and
dissolved thoughtlessly, without any intention
of fidelity, without the worth of responsibility.
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The Choice of Parents 53
But they must also know that it is a still
greater transgression of their duty if the life
of a child is called forth with cold hearts arid
cold temper, whether this happens in a mar-
riage based on worldly motives or one
maintained on moral grounds in which the
previously existing discord is transmitted to a
new being.
Mothers made apathetic and unresponsive,
by the consciousness of numerous breaches of
faith, towards their youthful dreams, their
ideal convictions, are often precisely those,
who in their children, struggle against the
pure instincts of love, its chaste and strong
feelings, its higher aims. They often teach
that love as a rule ends after marriage, that
marriages can be made without love. This
is a process of thought resembling the con-
clusion that a vessel can quite well go into
the sea with some defect, since it is possible
in any event that it will be damaged. They
speak of the impurity of the senses, of the
advantages of a marriage based on friendship
and reason, of the calming power of duty. All
of these are chilly processes of reason by
which souls, filled with the warmth of life,
are killed. Daughters must be helped by
their mothers, wisely and delicately, in order
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54 The Century of the Child
to be protected from hasty acts, in order to
distinguish with open eyes, when their feel-
ings themselves are micertain. It must be
branded upon their souls and their nerves that
they will be fallen beings if they give them-
selves from other reasons than from recipro-
cated love. Under these convictions alone,
will there be a great transformation of present
ethical standards. Men think that they can
do with marriage what they will; that they
can enter upon it with any kind of motive;
they think that they must marry from feelr
ings of duty, to fulfil some given engagement,
or to atone for some fault; that they have the
right to enter upon a marriage without love
because they long for home life. While these
things are regarded as legitimate, men stand
on the same ethical level as the person who
commits murder because he has first stolen,
or has stolen because he was hungry. The
great crime against the holiness of generation
is believing that one can treat arbitrarily, the
most sensitive sphere of life, the sphere where
innumerable secret influences order the des-
tiny of a new generation.
While children continue to be bom in the
cold atmosphere of duty, or in the stormy
atmosphere of discord, while people continue
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The Choice of Parents 55
to regard such marriages as moral, while peo-
ple can transmit to their children all kinds of
intellectual mutilation and bodily unsound-
ness, and their parents continue to be called
honorable, so long will the world be without
the slightest conception of that morality which
will mould the new mankind.
This morality has still more exalted pre-
cepts. To-day it seldom happens that a
young girl enters marriage in ignorance, but
in my generation I know cases where the
ignorance of the bride resulted in insanity.
In another case this ignorance led to thoughts
of suicide; in a third, the child was regarded
with coldness by its mother; in the fourth,
the child had abnormal psychic qualities.
Still it is not sufficient for the ideal beauty
of marriage and the harmony of the child
that the woman knows in general what is
before her. A young man said once to me
that most marriages are spoilt at the very
beginning, because the man brings with him
the point of view and the habits of those
degraded women, from whom he has received
his initiation into love; frequently he annihi-
lates forever the tenderest element in his re-
lation to his wife. He damages the most
beautiful factor in their mutual feelings. Man
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56 The Century of the Child
must learn to have reverence and patience^
and I know men who have shown these char-
acteristics really because they saw that their
wives gave, as is not unfrequently the case,
their souls and their hearts before their senses
were awakened. Only the constant close as-
sociation taught them to desire a completed
marriage. A child should receive life only
through this common impulse. Many chil-
dren are bom, as it is, in legalised prostitution,
in legalised rape. Yet there is wanting in
the consciences of many women and men, the
slightest shadow of religious reverence, of
aesthetic feeling before the greatest mystery of
existence. And yet we continue in the name
of morality to veil for youth the nakedness
of nature and we neglect to inspire their feel-
ing of devotion towards their own being as
the shrine in which the mystery of life must
some day be fulfilled.
In this mystery there are still hidden fields
only penetrated by the intuition. Here and
there a profoimd poet has surmised the in-
numerable afiinities or repulsions which under
changing spiritual and material dispositions
with altering opinions, condition the life of
love in modem human beings, the mystic in-
fluences which sometimes forever, sometimes
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The Choice of Parents 57
partially, can change the deepest feeling. All
these mystic influences, the tender woof of all
these fine threads, will then be a part of the
living fabric of the child. These secret pro-
cesses explain the great differences between
children of the same parents, — children who
externally are bom and brought up in quite
similar conditions.
In all these promptings of instinct, in all
these categorical imperatives of the nerves
and the blood, human beings must be at
the same time obedient listeners and strict
masters. On this depends the future happi-
ness of love, and with it a happier future
race.
The people of to-day live under inherited
morals and newly acquired transgressions of
morality. Both must be conquered before
soul and sense in love can become inseparable,
or in other words, before this imity is recog-
nised as the only possible moral basis of the
relation between man and woman.
Talented men, as well as one-sided advocates
of women's rights, think that the development
will take quite a different course, after the
low impulse which is at the basis of love has
been laid bare and scientifically analysed.
They say that the superior person will satisfy
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58 The Century of the Child
the impulse shamelessly and animally, with-
out any emotional decoration; or he will iso-
late himself from its inflvence and devote to
more noble purposes that vital power, that
emotional capacity, which is now consumed
by love.
Nothing impossible is to be found in this
point of view, I have shown more than once
that woman by her maternal functions, uses
up so much physical and psychical energy,
that in the sphere of intellectual production
she must remain of less significance. What
I at an earlier period assumed intuitively,
has been substantiated since then by a spe-
ciaUst. A Finnish doctor has shown how the
vital power of lower organisms, is concen-
trated in sexual production. But the higher
man goes, so much more power is made free.
This power which is not consumed in the
production of new generations, can serve in-
tellectual production. Each of the two dif-
ferent productive expressions of human vital
action must to a certain extent limit the
development of the power of the other, and
restrict its capacity of work. The same
writer contends that this is the natural cause
of the more hmited fertility of civilised man,
and will be, according to the pessimists named
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The Choice of Parents 59
above, the decisive factor in the prophesied
downfall of love.
According to my conception of the word,
it is love on the contrary, which will win the
victory by the relative weakening of impulse,
and by scientific analysis of the same. Men
will no longer mistake impulse for love. Of
course this impulse is always present in love,
but in the same way in which the sculpture
of the cave man is present in the work of
Michael Angelo. Man will then, with all
the powers of his being, be able to love, when
love, according to the happy expression of
Thoreau, is not a glow, but a light. Then
he will see for the first time, what wealth
life can have through love, when love be-
comes a happiness worthy of man because it
becomes an aesthetic creation, a religious
worship; when the completed unity of those
who love is expressed in a new being, — ^a be-
ing that will some day be really grateful for
the life it has received. Where the amelio-
ration of the human race is concerned, the
transformation of customs and feeUngs is
always the essential thing. Influence of
legislation in comparison with it is ever
slight. But as has been said before, legis-
lation has its role to play. Especially where
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there are diseases which can certainly he trans-
mitted, society must interfere to restrict mar-
riage. In Germany and America a good
proposal has been made, for the period of
transition in this direction. It is suggested
that the law shall require as an obligatory
condition for marriage, a certificate of a
medical witness with complete data as to the
health of both parties. Those who contract
marriage will continue to have their free-
dom of choice but at least they would not
enter ignorantly upon marriage as they do
now, and expose themselves and their children
to disastrous consequences. It appears to me
to be at least as important for society to have
a medical certificate as to capacity for mar-
riage, as it is for military service. In the one
case, we deal with giving Ufe, in the other
with taking it away. And although the latter
has certainly been, up till now, regarded as
a more serious occasion than the former,
still an awakening social conscience should
demand progress in this direction. It is con-
ceivable that from this beginning new cus-
toms will develop; further legislation may be
dispensed with; human beings will agree to
sacrifice the most dangerous of all liberties,
giving life to a defective offspring, while pro-
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The Choice of Parents 6i
hibition of marriage now would not hinder
parenthood. For the great mass might con-
tinue, outside of marriage, to rob children of
the possibiUties of health and happiness, by
burdening them with inherited diseases or
bad tendencies.
Nietzsche, who knew little of love because
he knew nothing of woman, and who there-
fore on this subject says Uttle worthy of
attention, has still spoken more profoundly on
the subject of parenthood than any contem-
porary writer. He saw what impurity, what
poverty are concealed under the name of
marriage. He saw how meretricious, how
ignorant education is. In his writings are to
be found prophetical and poetical words de-
scribing the end aimed at in parenthood, and
showing what true parenthood should be.
I will that thy victory and thy emancipation
shall yearn for a child. Living memorials shalt
thou build for thy victory, and fop thy emanci-
pation.
Thou must build upward to a height beyond thy-
self. But first I would have thee thyself built with
a square foundation^ body and soul.
See that through thee the race progresses, not
continues only.
Let a true marriage help thee to this end.
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62 The Century of the Child
A more exalted being must thou create, a being
gifted with initiative like a wheel that tnms itself.
A creative principle shonldst thon create.
Marriage: I call marriage the will shared by
two, to create the one, — ^the one that is in itself
more than its creators. Reverence for one another,
I call marriage; snch reverence as is meet for those
whose wills are united in this one act of will.
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CHAPTER II
THE UNBOEN BACE AND WOMAN's WOEK
There are few factors in the life of the
present in which the dualism between theory
and practice is greater and more imconscious
than in questions concerning woman. The
protagonists of the feminist movement are in
many cases sturdily Christian. They protest
with vigour against the idea that they could
have any share in the sort of emancipation of
personality that includes freedom for all the
powers and activities of the personality. In-
dividualism, and the assertion of self are for
them degrading words with a sinful signifi-
cance. That the emancipation of women is
practically the greatest egoistic movement of
the nineteenth century, and the most intense
affirmation of the right of the self that history
has yet seen, they have no suspicion. Free-
dom for the powers and the personality of
woman have never appeared to them except
as an ideal struggle for justice, as a noble
victory to be won. In its deepest meaning
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64 The Century of the Child
this is as true of every other ejflPort at self-
aiSbrmation, the end of which is the recog-
nition of the right of human personality to
the full development of capacities in a sphere
of freedom, where responsibility belongs to
the self alone. But just as every other such
affirmation of the individual self, of a class,
of a race, easily falls into an imjustifiable
egoism, so with the emancipation of woman.
This great, deep, serious movement for
woman's emancipation has in the course of
time received a new name, the " Woman Ques-
tion." The change in terminology signifies a
change in the attitude of thought. From a
real emancipation movement, that is, a move-
ment to free the restricted powers of woman
and her restricted personality, the movement
has become a question, a social institution
with officers, a church system with dogmas.
Certainly we still hear in books and speeches
that the woman question is being discussed
and urged, in its relation to the happiness
and development of the whole of humanity.
But in reality the woman question, since it
became a fact, a cause with an end of its
own, since its champions have lost more and
more their appreciation of its connection with
other great questions of the day, is tending
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 65
to increase the civil rights and the fields of
woman's labour. In both cases people really
have the women of the upper classes in view.
This has been the end, and it is thoroughly
justified and justifiable. But, in striving for
this end, those who are aiming at it have
come more and more into opposition to the first
and highest of all rights, the rights of the
individual woman to think her own thoughts,
to go her own ways, even when these thoughts
and these ways follow other courses than
those of the advocates of woman's rights.
While this group is, on one hand, very far
from conceding to the individual woman the
freedom which belongs to her, it is, on the
other hand, blind to the results of the self-
assertion of the whole female sex. In taking
up work more and more external in char-
acter, they are blind to the profound and
revolutionary effects of this movement, on the
conditions of labour in the present day, on the
existence of man and the family, on society as
a whole.
Doing away with an imjust paragraph in
a law which concerns woman, turning a hun-
dred women into a field of work where only ten
were occupied before, giving one woman work
where formerly not one was employed, — ^these
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are the mile-stones in the line of progress of
the woman's rights movement. It is a line
pursued without consideration of feminine ca-
pacities, nature, and environment.
The exclamation of a woman's rights cham-
pion when another woman had become a
butcher, " Go thou and do likewise," and an
American young lady working as an execu-
tioner, are, in this connection, characteristic
phenomena.
The emancipation of woman has practically
ceased to be the freedom which enlarges soul
and heart. It is conducted quite officially,
Uke a business, and dogmatically, too, with-
out feeling for the pulsating manifoldness of
life, and has become an egoistic self -concen-
trated campaign. On this account I, and
many others of my generation, with many
more of the younger generation, stand out-
side of the movement, although we actively
wished, and still wish, for the freedom of
woman. The champions of woman's rights,
like the champions of other movements for
rights, illustrate the truth of the old Swedish
saying, that " what we are pursuing is really
only a nmaway horse attached to our waggon."
How blindly the fanatics of woman's rights
have rushed by the other needs of the time
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 67
can be best measured by considering their at-
titude towards the greatest question of the
day — I mean the social question.
The old advocates of woman's rights
maintain that the adult woman must have the
same right as the adult man to " protect " her-
self, and they ask why the woman is hindered
from working because she is married, or be-
cause she has children. Protective legislation
drives woman from the factories and work-
shops; and this legislation is very far, they tell
us, from meriting the support of women.
Women, on the contrary, they say, should
demand the same protective legislation for wo-
men as for men. They ask for technical in-
struction and an extended field of work for
women.
This whole argument is quite logical from
the point of view that limitation of woman's
labour is opposed to one of the foremost prin-
ciples of our time, — the self-determination of
the individual. This implies the right of the
adult woman, as well as the adult man, to
choose her own work. Privileges on the
ground of sex only hinder the woman from
being put on an equality with man before the
law.
But all these arguments are based on the
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68 The Century of the Child
sophistical notion which perverts the whole
feminist movement. The idea is to free
woman from the limitations of nature. It in-
volves, too, the other sophistical notion with
which capitalistic society meets every demand
of protective legislation for men, women, or
children. Such legislation is said to he an in-
terference with the individual's right of choice.
Every human being who is socially alive
is aware that this right to control one's life is
the emptiest phrase to describe reality in a so-
ciety built up on a capitalistic basis. It is
doubly empty where woman is concerned, I
have never heard a woman desire that woman
should fulfil military duties as an equivalent
for having civil rights like man. But this
would be the consequence of the argument that
woman should have no privileges on the
groimd of her sex. The greatest privilege
that can be thought of in modern society is to
be spared the discomforts and loss of time
that come from military training, to be exempt
from the dangers and the terrors of war. That
women are not absolutely incapable of service
in warfare, women have shown on many occa-
sions, especially in the Boer War. So when
the advocates of women's rights hesitate before
this extreme consequence of their principle, and
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 69
introduce the functions of motherhood as a
cogent ground for the privilege of being
freed from military service in time of war
(even if women at some time should receive the
same civil rights now enjoyed by man), they
are in the highest degree illogical. Other
women with more logic declare that on another
battle-field, a still more destructive one, that of
the factory system, the same maternal func-
tions require certain privileges for woman,
and these same functions must result in sub-
jecting her to certain limitations of her indi-
vidual right to control her life. That is, she
cannot pass beyond the limits drawn by na-
ture, without interfering with the rights of
another, the potential child.
It lies in the individual sphere of woman's
choice as of man's choice not to choose mar-
riage, or to desire it without parenthood; and
for exemption from the latter, real altruistic
as well as real egoistic reasons can be urged.
It lies in the individual choice of the woman,
as well as of the man, to isolate herself from
what may be regarded as an obstacle to her
individual development, or to her freedom of
movement. She can do without love or
motherhood, if the one or both of these are
regarded from this point of view. Woman
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has the full right to allow herself to be turned
into a third sex, the sex of the working bees,
or the sexless ant, provided she finds in this
her highest happiness.
A good while ago I was ingenuous enough
to maintain that motherhood was the central
factor of existence for most women. In the
discussion of this question I considered several
facts: woman's work imposed by necessity,
woman's ambition stimulated by the freedom
of her power, woman's intellectual life modi-
fied by many other influences of contemporary
thought, — ^all these have forced the maternal
instinct into the background for the time be-
ing. Here was a danger which, it seemed,
was not too late to expose. There are women
in whom the feeling of love is really and ab-
solutely stunted; there are others who do not
find in modern man the soulful and profound
harmony in love that they quite rightly de-
mand; there are others, more numerous, who
wish for love but do not wish for motherhood.
They absolutely fear it. The famous German
authoress Gabrielle Renter has spoken of this
fear, this alarm of motherhood continually
vigilant, active, placing woman in an attitude
of self-defence, — a fear which to-day has taken
possession of so many strenuous and creative
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 71
women. The alarm, the aversion, becomes so
strong, so dominant in them that one might
almost believe it a dark perverse instinct,
which, like all unnatural instincts, has been
conceived and born through cruel necessities,
and through these necessities has become over-
mastering. It is as if a secret voice in the
depths of their nature was telling these women
that, by paying their tribute to their sex, they
would lose that power, brilliancy, and sharp-
ness of intellect by which they have elevated
themselves above their sex; and perhaps cer-
tain kinds of women are right in having this
fear.
I am convinced, just as the German writer
is, that every actual phenomenon of disease
and of health alike is a necessary result from
given causes; and I am more convinced than
the advocates of women's rights ever were,
that it is in the sphere of human freedom to
choose one's own type of development, happi-
ness, or ruin. I am not inclined to say any-
thing further to the women who do not desire
motherhood.
It would be very disastrous if these women,
who have never been moved by tenderness when
they felt a soft childish hand in their own, who
have never longed to surrender themselves
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72 The Century of the Child
entirely to another being, were to become
mothers. Their children would be more im-
f ortunate than they themselves.
Many women like these are to be found to-
day, and if things remain as they are, they are
bound to increase in numbers. In some of
them, however, the maternal instinct is not
dead, but only dormant. Modem women with
their capacity for psychic analysis, with their
physical and psychical refinement, are often
repelled by the crudeness, the ignorance, or
the importimities of man's nature. The whole
factor of love in the being of these women is
shrivelled up as a bud that has never blos-
somed, and in enthusiasm for a duty, or for a
woman friend, they find an expression for that
sacrifice whose real aim they deny or overlook,
a something which ends often by avenging it-
self in a tragic way.
I am simply insisting that every woman, who
has not yet ceased to desire motherhood, has
duties as a girl, and still more as a woman, to
the imborn generation from which she cannot
free herself without absolute selfishness. This
selfishness is often disguised under a great im-
pulse, an impulse which, like that of the pre-
servation of the species, masters existence. I
mean the impulse of self -protection. But it
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 73
is just this that should make the "obliga-
tory " egoism of the modern working woman
appear so terrible to those who are busied with
the emancipation of woman.
To talk of the freedom of woman, of her
individual right to control her actions, when
she works like a beast of burden to reach a
minimum of existence, to keep from dying
of starvation, to talk of the freedom of wo-
men where conditions are such that the free
choice of work, for man as well as for woman,
is an empty phrase — ^to put it mildly, it is
senseless. I will throw some light on the re-
sults of freedom by the following illustration:
When women in England worked in white
lead factories, seventy-seven women were ex-
amined in one factory. It appeared in the
time covered by the investigation that there
were among this number ninety miscarriages,
twenty-seven cases of still-born children; be-
side, forty young children died of convulsions
produced by the poisoning of their mothers.
The effects of this occupation were most harm-
ful in the case of women from eighteen to
twenty-three years of age. Lameness, blind-
ness, and other infirmities resulted from this
kind of work.
An English doctor has shown from exact
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74 The Century of the Child
investigations conducted during a number of
years, that the enormous mortality among
young children in factory districts arises
chiefly because the child is deprived of a
mother's care a few weeks after birth. A child
needs its mother's milk at least six months, and
the mother's milk cannot be substituted by ar-
tificial means, least of all when the substitutes
are used with carelessness. In certain textile
factory districts, in Nottingham, for example,
where lace is produced, and where people have
complained of the law limiting women's work,
out of each thousand children, two hundred die
annually. Mortahty in factory districts is four
to five times greater than in country districts;
and yet the death of children is, relatively
speaking, a lesser evil. More unfortunate
still is it that those who survive always suffer
partial weakness from the lack of a mother's
care at a tender age.
In Silesia, where children and quite young
girls are employed in the glass industry, the
work has so distorted their bodily structure
that when they bear children, their sufferings
are intense. Such unique material do they
offer for the study of obstetrics, that doctors
make pilgrimages to Silesia to learn from their
cases.
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 75
Before women have reached maturity, when
they can, according to the advocates of
women's rights, protect themselves, they are
mined physically. If it is said that the facts
mentioned above belong to the question of the
protection of children, not to that of the pro-
tection of women, the answer lies close at hand.
The physical and moral interest of children
and of women are so mutually related, that
they cannot be separated. Crippled women
have children who are stunted at the time of
their birth. The burden of toil they take up
with weakened power of resistance and they
transmit this weakness to their offspring.
Cause and effect are so intimately associated
here, that they cannot be accurately appor-
tioned between the work of women and the
work of children.
Even the advocates of women's rights must
allow that the limit of their claims to right is
to be found where the right of another begins.
They cannot suppose that the individual right
of the woman to control her life should go so
far that a woman could take a piece of a neigh-
bour's property to lay out a garden, or use for
an industrial scheme a part of the water power
belonging to some one else.
Can they not see that woman's individ-
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76 The Century of the Child
ual freedom is limited by the rights of an-
other, by the rights of the potential child?
The potential child has its own proper rights,
its own vital power. This property, the wo-
man has not the right to encroach upon in
advance.
A woman, who from one motive or an-
other, great or small, permanently keeps out-
side of the marriage relation, has complete
right to ruin herself by work, provided she
does not, as a result of so doing, become a
burden to others through incapacity.
But the woman who looks forward to moth-
erhood as a possibility for herself, or the
woman who is expecting to become a mother,
should not, through an unlimited amount of
voluntary work or of work forced upon her
contrary to her will, sacrifice the capacities for
life and work of an unborn generation, in
such a way that she will bring into the world
weak, invalid, or physically incapable children,
who will later on be neglected.
It does not occur to the dogmatic advocates
of women's rights that their talk about the in-
dividual freedom of the woman to control her
career, their contention that no limitation need
restrict woman's power of deciding her own
vocation, because they are married or are
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 77
mothers, mean the most crying injury, not
only to children, but to women themselves.
For the demand of equality, where nature has
made inequality, brings about the injury of
the weaker factor. Equality is not justice.
Often it is just the opposite, the most abso-
lute injustice.
The strongest reasoning will not convince
those advocates of women's rights who discuss
woman's labour from the old-fashioned level
of individualism, unaffected by the social feel-
ing of solidarity, which is the solution offered
by our age. But fortimately protective legis-
lation does not depend on the women who
advocate the rights of women. The working-
men's movement, aided by women and men
of all classes who are active in it, will carry
through this legislation. The movement for
the normal working day is steadily gaining
ground.
Experience has shown that, because of the
greater intensity of the work done, just as
much can be accomplished in a shorter as in a
longer time. The first concern has been the
work of children and of yoimger adults. The
effect of factory life on the health of women
themselves, as well as on their children, has
excited general attention. In England first.
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78 The Century of the Child
then in other European countries, it has become
recognised as necessary that a normal period
of work should be laid down for women as
well. The programme was and continues to
be threefold: — ^a maximum working time for
women's work; limitation, or, better still, the
cessation of night work on the part of women;
the prevention, too, of the work of women in
mines and in certain other industries danger-
ous to health; finally the protection of women
who are about to become mothers. In most
European countries there is now a maximum
working time fixed at eight to eleven hours.
Night work, work in mines, and extra work,
is either forbidden or considerably limited,
and a rest period of three to eight weeks is
established for women at childbirth.
From all points of view, an eight-hour
working day should be the highest limit for
woman's work. There are more reasons for
it in her case than for man's work. The eight-
hour day means not only for the woman as for
the man the possibility of enjoying her life in
permanent health; it secures time for im-
proving recreation. For the married woman
it is an indispensable requirement. Without
it her home cannot be kept in order and com-
fort, her children cannot be physically cared
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 79
for; without it she is not able to co-operate
in their education. The normal working day
is, therefore, more necessary for the woman
than for the man, because on her, rather than
on him, comes the burden of household work.
The dangers of night work, as of work in
mines, are from the standpoint of health and
morality so plain, that no further reason need
be urged to defend protective legislation in
this case.
But not only the theoretical principles of
women's rights are urged against this legisla-
tion. Socialists as well as the advocates of
women's rights are responsible for different
objections of a more solid character. It is
urged that legislation will increase the number
of unemployed women who, in order to live,
will be forced into prostitution, but it is for-
gotten that the same result comes from low
wages in many occupations, aoid that these
low wages are caused by an over-supply of
working women. It is said, also, that if pro-
tective legislation hinders or prevents women
from working, they will not be able to care
for their children and the children will
be employed in the factory in their stead.
The way out of the last difficulty is abso-
lutely plain: the complete prohibition of all
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work by chUdren under fifteen years of
age.
It is urged also that if women are hindered
by legislation from fulfilling the demands of
their occupation, the result will be, not that
they are protected in their occupation, but that
the occupation is protected against them. The
remedy in this case is certainly difficult, but
not impossible to find. Let only the tenth part
of the energy now used in agitation for the
free right of women to labour be employed
in preparing women for such labour as they
are suited to undertake. But even when
this cannot be done protective legislation car-
ries with it its own corrective. It is always
urged that the occupation will be destroyed
by protective legislation. Then new methods
and new machines will be invented to replace
cheap labour power. Those who are pro-
tected often themselves complain that they
suffer economically under protective legisla-
tion, but a long experience will show them
how, through the reciprocal effects of all fac-
tors in production, the temporary failures will
be balanced. A potent remedy for this effect
of protective legislation may be looked for in
the assertion, found in the programmes of all
labour parties, of the right of the unemployed
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 8i
to have work, and a fixed minimum wage.
These demands along with that for a normal
working day, in which is included rest at night
and rest on Sunday, and other measures for
the protection of workingmen against accident
and old age, are the chief methods by which the
labour question, both for men and women, will
be solved. Until these aims are realised Rus-
kin's judgment on modern industrialism
which kills the real humanity in man holds
good both for men and for women. We
make, he says, everything except real men;
we bleach cotton; we harden and improve
steel; we refijie sugar; we make porcelain and
print books; but to refine a single living soul,
to reform it, to improve it never enters into
our reckoning of profit.
The women of the working classes must con-
tinue to endure the suffering, to bear the dan-
gers, to subject themselves to the forces which
solidarity in this great struggle implies. Only
under these conditions can men as well as
women elevate themselves, partly by their own
combination, partly by the extension of the
principle, more and more coming to be recog-
nised, that society, through its legislation, can
determine the conditions under which its mem-
bers work. So will be produced conditions of
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82 The Century of the Child
life and of work worthy of mankind, — ^a
healthier, stronger, and more beautiful race.
In this ever continuing progress every part
is related to every other part.
Unorganised, ordinary and therefore badly
paid work, done by woman, diminishes the
wages of man and his opportunity of work.
Work in a factory unfits the woman for the
conduct of the household, for her duties as a
mother. In the turmoil, heat, and rush of the
factory her nerves are destroyed and with them
her fijier emotions. The woman loses not only
the right hand, but also the right heart for
family life. Badly conditioned women make
marriage more difficult for the man; through
celibacy, his mortality is increased. Low
wages, or times of lack of employment, cause
bad dwellings, bad clothes, and bad nourish-
ment. The tortured or ill-conditioned woman
is not able to prepare anything good with the
small amount of money which the man may
earn. From all of this come intemperance
and disease. Through these causes, com-
bined with those already noted, the population
of factory districts degenerates, in repub-
lican Switzerland, not less than in absolutistic
Russia.
It is true that such limitations of work in
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 83
many cases are felt, as well by the single wo-
man as by the family. The restriction of
child labour may bring immediate discomfort.
But all this is a passing evil. It can be cor-
rected, as soon as it is clearly seen in what di-
rection the advance along all the line is being
made. This kind of progress moves in zigzag
fashion. What decides whether temporary
limitation of freedom makes for progress or
not is whether one finds, in turning from the
individual, or small groups, to the great whole,
that the last is gaining, that in the future, free-
dom and happiness for all will be increased by
this temporary limitation of freedom.
In other relations of life it is a just law
that he who goes into a game must abide by
its rules. But this rule cannot be applied to
that very cruel game which we call life. We
do not go into it of our own will. Children
have the right not to be obliged to suffer for
the mistakes and errors of their parents. How
this suffering can be best avoided in case of
an inharmonious marriage must be decided by
the different individuals, as a question belong-
ing to them alone. As I have already shown,
change of custom in relation to the time, age,
and motives for marriage is the surest pro-
tection for the children, a protection that will
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84 The Century of the Child
gradually be extended. Under a serious con-
viction of woman's duty as a member of her
sex, it will be regarded as a crime for a yomig
wife volmitarily to ill-treat her person, either
by excessive study, or excessive attention to
sports, by tight-lacing, or consumption of
sweets, by smoking or the use of stimulants,
by sitting up at night, excessive work, or by
all the thousand other ways by which these
attractive simpletons sin against nature, until
nature finally loses all patience with them.
It must be demanded of the laws of society
that they hinder involuntary crimes of unpro-
tected women against their feminine nature.
This is the great work of woman's emanci-
pation; everything else compared with it is
non-essential. Through their failure to see
this the present representatives of women's
rights are working against progress, though
they themselves apply the word reactionary to
all who assert that the only way by which the
woman question as a whole can be solved is
through the social revolution. In this revolu-
tion protective legislation is an important
factor.
According to my method of thinking, and
that of many others, not woman but the
mother is the most precious possession of the
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 85
nation, so precious that society advances its
own highest well-being when it protects the
functions of the mother. These functions are
not limited to birth nor to the nourishment of
the child; but they go on during the whole time
of its training. I believe that in the new so-
ciety where all women and men alike will be
compelled to work (not children, not invalids,
and not the aged) people will regard the ma-
ternal function as so important for the whole
social order, that every mother under fixed
conditions, subject to certain control, during
a certain period, and for a certain number of
children, will obtain from society an allowance
for education. She will receive this during
the time in which her children require all her
care, while she herself is freed from work out-
side the home. Naturally this does not ex-
clude the case of mothers who from one or
another reason cannot devote themselves to the
care and training of their children; they can
by their own productive work secure a sub-
stitute. But for the majority of women, the
proposal made above would undoubtedly be
the real solution of many problems which
now seem insoluble. I do not believe that
social development will maintain the old ideal
of the father as the one who takes care of the
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86 The Century of the Child
family. I hope, rather, that the new conception
of having every individual look after himself
will gain more ground. The father will then
be, in the real sense of the word, the educator,
when the care for the maintenance of the fam-
ily does not press him down to the groimd,
A woman will then, as mother of the family,
not be in dependence on the man, — a position
she feels as humiliating, if as a girl she earned
her own living. People are bound to return to
this new form of matriarchy, when they begin
to consider care of the new generation, as the
great business the mother takes over for so-
ciety. During its progress society must
guarantee her existence. In many cases, the
answer of the married woman who works out-
side the home would be as follows: That her
happiness would consist in quietly looking af-
ter her children, and in being able to keep
house, but that she must have an income that
would make her independent of her husband.
A Swedish evening paper, the special organ
of the feminist movement, two years ago
started an investigation on the productive work
of married women. The answers, contrary to
the expectations of the paper, were nearly
unanimous in showing what dangers for child-
ren, and what interference with household
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 87
comfort, were caused by the woman working
outside the home. An impartial investigation
of the causes of the increasing brutality of the
young would show certainly that the rapid
increase in crime in several countries among
the young is caused partly by their prema-
turely taking up productive work, and partly
by early lack of home life, the result of the
mother working outside the home.
If the world is agreed that children must
still continue to be bom and that a home f lu*-
nishes generally the best means for training
them during the first years of their life, the
present consequences of woman's work done
outside the home must cause pessimism; such
work must be stopped. After we have thought
over the matter, it is plain that nothing is now
more needed than such plans of social order,
such programmes of education, as will give
the mother back to her children and to her
home.
Everything that philanthropy now does to
heal the injurious and disintegrating effects
of the capitalistic industrial system is on
the whole wasted power. Children's crtehes,
kindergartens, providing meals for children,
hospitals, vacation homes, cannot with all
their noble efforts replace a hundredth part of
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88 The Century of the Child
the life energy, taken directly or indirectly
from the new generation by women working
outside the home.
There are some people who expect the prob-
lem of domestic life to be solved by collective
institutions which will take care of the child-
ren, and give them meals. Just as brewing,
baking, slaughtering, making candles and
clothes, have more and more ceased to be done
in the home, much of the work which now ab-
sorbs the greatest part of household activity,
cooking, washing, mending and cleaning
clothes, will, I firmly believe, finally be done
by collective effort, by the help of electricity
and machines. But I hope the tendency of
man towards individualisation will overcome
the tendency towards impersonal, uniform ap-
plication of power en masse, in everything by
which the innermost relations of life and pri-
vate habits are deeply affected. A strong
family life will, I hope, be regarded as the
basis for true happiness and for the develop-
ment of personality. When women are free
from the barbarous relics of present methods of
housekeeping, — ^the market basket, the kitchen
utensils, the scrubbing brush gone from every
house, electricity everywhere spreading warmth
and life, — they will still be forced to do a cer-
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 89
tain amount of work. This cannot be avoided
even by the help of the most perfect apparatus
and by co-operative methods, provided the
house is not to be replaced by the barrack.
And since the custom of keeping servants will
soon cease because, probably, there will be no
servants to keep, all women will be forced to
do housework, or find the remedy already dis-
covered in America where bureaus supply
domestic help for a fixed time for a fixed price.
In London, too, there is at present a guild for
general houseworkers who are trained for oc-
cupation and work under regularly estab-
lished conditions. In the country, not only
wives but daughters will be needed for agri-
cultural labour, when there are no more hired
labourers to be had. This will be a natural
corrective against that pressure towards out-
side fields of labour, that has taken the daugh-
ters in multitudes away from home, and has
crowded and overflowed the cities with them.
Finally if we weigh the economic loss oc-
casioned by the fact that women after five or
ten years' preparation have to give up work
or study as a result of marriage, it is easy to
see that the modern work of women has had
results which must soon lead to earnest
thought, in balancing up the accounts for or
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90 The Century of the Child
against the system. From the point of view
of the woman herself, from the children's point
of view, from the man's point of view, and fi-
nally, from the productive point of view, it
has become pretty plain that society must
either change the conditions of woman's labour
or see a progressive disintegration in home life.
Society must either transform the conditions
of life and work, or it will witness the degen-
eration of the sexes.
All philanthropy — ^no age has seen more of
it than our own — is only a savoury fmniga-
tion burning at the mouth of a sewer. This
incense offering makes the air more endurable
for passers-by, but it does not hinder the in-
fection in the sewer from spreading.
Selfishness, the instinct of self-preservation,
will perhaps end by forcing the leaders of so-
ciety to direct their actions from the social
point of view. Then the woman question will
become a question of humanity; then will its
champions perhaps come to see that there can
be no enduring good for the woman, if she
works under conditions injurious to men and
to children. It will be seen that the old axiom
can be justly applied to the demands made in
the name of woman's individuality; supreme
right becomes supreme injustice. Justice is
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 91
not to be reached by having the woman work
mider conditions which ruin both her and the
whole generation physically. In other re-
spects she must be able to use her free choice,
and be educated enough to make good use of
it. Justice consists in protecting innumerable
women, who are not able as yet to protect
themselves, against the abuses of which capital
is guilty in employing their labour power.
It is an instructive feature in the history of
class conflict, and of the movement for
women's progress, that as women began by
driving men out of certain fields of labour, so
now unmarried women try to force married
women from the labour market. In America,
where everything goes at full speed, an asso-
ciation has been founded among immarried
women with this intention. These and simi-
lar phenomena belong to the system of free
competition, the creation of the "leading
thought of our time, the right of the individual
to determine his own vocation." Perhaps
when the war of women against women be-
comes the rule, the women's rights women will
see that the problem of woman's work is more
complicated than they imagine. They have
continued to look at it till now only from the
point of view of a woman's right to take care
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92 The Century of the Child
of herself. Perhaps they will then understand
that individualism, apart from the feeling of
solidarity, leads to social conflict, class against
class, sex against sex, unmarried against mar-
ried, young against old. So it will be seen
that only in the transformation of the whole
of society can woman attain her full rights
without impairing, through her advance, the
rights of others.
The sooner the women's rights party imder-
stands this, the better. Instead of fighting
protective legislation, they should advocate it;
instead of regarding unions and strikes with
disfavour, they should help labouring women
to organise unions, and support strikes where
strikes are justified.
Our century, which has opened up to wo-
men new fields of labour, has made life very
hard for her by forcing her in the competitive
struggle. As wives, as married or immarried
mothers, as divorced women, as widows, wo-
men often not only have the burden of their
own support to bear, but they have frequently
the role of guardian of a family, working for
an invalid or intemperate husband; for child-
ren, or sisters, or aged parents. These women,
whether they belong to those who labour with
the brain or with the hand, are worn out, partly
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 93
by earning their own living, partly by house-
hold tasks. While the man goes from home
to his work, refreshed by rest, the woman often
goes already tired out, and she comes back to
the house perhaps to work at night. It is as
clear as day that by so doing she loses her
bodily health and mental equanimity, both
needed by her children. It is astonishing how
many working women despite all this have
enough energy for intellectual effort in read-
ing and thinking. They soon see, women like
these, that an occupation is not emancipation.
The best that can be said is that it is only a
means to emancipation. Those who work
with their hands are not the worst off in this
respect. Bookkeepers, telephone and tele-
graph operators, post-office employees, shop
girls, waiters in public establishments, and
servants in private houses, who must often
serve the public standing, and who are often
deprived of rest at night and on Sunday, are
practically labour's worst slaves. Who can
wonder if the possible income obtained by an
immoral life is reckoned by the employer, when
he secures for his establishment, at low wages,
the services of attractive young girls? Small
wonder it is that such employees, worried to
death in shops, telephone bureaus, post and
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94 The Century of the Child
telegraph offices, should often be driven to
hysteria, insanity, and suicide.
The advocates of women's rights are not
blind to all these incongruities. They ask
equal salaries for men and women, and claim,
often with justice, and often without, that wo-
men's work is too inadequately compensated.
But they do not see that they have contributed
to the evil by constantly urging women to
work in all possible occupations, and that a
low rate of wages and an overcrowding of all
fields of labour is the result. It is far more
necessary to pay attention to these things
than to open up new fields of labour to women,
if their vital energy is not to be dried up, if
they are not to lose their youthful freshness
and attractiveness prematurely, and their pos-
sibilities for development and happiness as hu-
man beings, wives, and mothers.
A loss of freedom accomplished gradually,
this is, on the whole, the sad result of the so-
called emancipation of women in our century,
if the subject is looked at broadly, apart from
the few thousand women of the upper classes
in good paying positions. For several dec-
ades, I have felt strongly against the import-
ance given by the advocates of women's rights
to the work of women outside of the home, for
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 95
the reasons I have given above. I have ap-
plied to such work the objection formulated
by Feuerbach in these words: " Mediocrity al-
ways weighs correctly, only its weight is
false."
Wherever we look, in Europe or America,
we find new and injurious results from the new
conditions, from the free activity of women's
work through the development of industry on
a large scale, through the transformation of
home work, and the growing conviction on the
part of women that " celibacy is the aristo-
cracy of the future," to quote the words of a
distinguished supporter of woman's rights.
Yet it would be foolish to wish a change in
these imhappy results through a reaction that
would again rob the woman of her essential
freedom in relation to her choice of work, and
the control of her life.
The line of progress is tending towards a
new society, where all will be compelled to
work and all will find work; where all will
work moderately under healthy conditions for
an adequate wage. Then neither the unmar-
ried nor the married woman will lose her
strength by exhausting work done to earn a
living, or impair the powers she needs for
motherhood. If she becomes a mother, in
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96 The Century of the Child
most cases she will really rejoice at the pos-
sibility offered to her by society of working
for society, as a mother and an educator.
We are yet very far from such a society, but
every social regulation should, as we have said,
be tested as to whether it brings us nearer this
ideal or leads us farther away from it. The
question should be asked whether the direc-
tion of thought is encouraged or restricted,
that will in the end transform everything, the
conviction I mean that economic production
is here in the world for the sake of men, not, as
now, men for the sake of production; that
work is to be done for the sake of freedom, not,
as now, freedom created for the sake of work.
When I tried in my book called The Mis-
use of the Power of Woman to urge women
to test the consequences of this process, my
thesis was as follows: In our programme of
civilisation, we must start out with the convic-
tion that motherhood is something essential to
the nature of woman and the way in which she
carries out this profession is of value for so-
ciety. On this basis we must alter the condi-
tions which more and more are robbing woman
of the happiness of motherhood and are rob-
bing children of the care of a mother. Or, we
must begin with the assumption that mother-
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 97
hood is not essential: then everything must
continue to go on as it is going on now, and
work directed towards external spheres with
its satisfaction in the joy of creation, of am-
bition, of gain, of enjoyment, of independence,
will be more and more the end towards which
women will arrange their plan of life. For
this end they will modify their fundamental
habits and remould their feelings. The naive
belief that every woman, who has the liberty to
do so, is following her own nature, shows a
complete ignorance of psychology and history.
Some ideal considered worth striving for, the
prevailing view of a period, will obtain su-
premacy over nature. This is shown best in
the stunted feeling of motherhood peculiar to
the eighteenth century, by the plain results of
mediaeval asceticism. By a new ideal innu-
merable women are now driven from a life
directed inwards to a life directed outwards.
I am in favour of real freedom for woman;
that is, I wish her to follow her own nature,
whether she be an exceptional or an ordinary
woman. But the opinion held by the feminine
advocates of woman's emancipation, in regard
to the nature and the aims of the everyday
woman, does violence to the real nature of
most women. It is one of the most remarkable
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98 The Century of the Child
manifestations of the times that, while women
preach about the rights of woman and her
will to work and to act unrestrained by
family ties, men like Ibsen, for example, in
When We Dead Pople Awake, show that the
real Fall of Man in life is transgression of the
law of love, meaning that man through this
transgression not only diminishes his person-
ality, but lessens his creative capacity.
It would appear as though men were ap-
proaching the conception of love once held by
women, while women were beginning to regard
love as a petty episode in life compared with
what are really its true concerns, an episode
which gives Kf e the colour of a sensual, senti-
mental, psychological, or sportsmanlike ad-
venture, an episode which she treats as a game
which she can get into, and just as easily get
out of. From this new position in which ex-
tremes meet, suffering, previously undreamed
of, must arise. Such results coming to the
emancipated woman will I hope reveal to her
the eternal laws of her own being, laws from
which she cannot be freed without destroying
herself.
I would not put the slightest hindrance, how-
ever, in the way of a single isolated woman
pursuing her own path freely, if it leads her
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 99
even to the most imusual forms of labour and
attempts to make a living. But for the sake
of women themselves, for the sake of children,
for the sake of society, I wish men as well as
women to think earnestly over the present
position of things. They will see that in the
near future, one of two things must be chosen.
Either there must be such a transformation
of the way in which modern society thinks and
works that the majority of women will be re-
stored to motherhood, or the disintegration of
the home and the substitution of general in-
stitutions will inevitably result. There is no
alternative.
Undoubtedly it required the whole egoistic
self-assertion of woman, all her efforts towards
individuality, her temporary separation from
home and from family, her independent efforts
to make a living to convince man and society
of the following truths: that woman is not
solely a sexual being, not solely dependent on
man, the home and the family, no matter in
what form these may exist. Only in this
way could woman fulfil her destiny as wife
and mother with really free choice. Only in
this way could she secure the right of being re-
garded as man's intellectual equal in the field
of the home and the family, the recognition
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that in her way she was just as complete
a heing as he.
But it is clear that this fragment of feminine
egoism must have a further consequence.
With the rights of sex the feeling of solidar-
ity must be awakened. The woman must see
that her emancipated and developed human
personaUty will lead to this solidarity by the
realisation of her especial vocation as woman.
Women in parliament and in journalism, their
representation in the local and general govern-
ment, in peace congress and in workingmen's
meetings, science and literature, all this will
produce small results imtil women realise that
the transformation of society begins with the
unborn child, with the conditions for its coming
into existence, its physical and psychical train-
ing. It must be the general conviction that
the new instincts, the new feelings, the new
thoughts, the new ideas, which mothers and
fathers pass on into the flesh and blood of their
children, will transform existence. When, af-
ter many successive generations, the new spirit-
ual kingdom of this world has arisen, there will
come into being these greater ideas through
which Kf e may be renewed.
Until that time secular misdeeds, political
injustice, economic struggles, — all these so-
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work loi
cially destructive abuses will go on from gen-
eration to generation. Mankind remains the
same though its acts may take different shapes.
Thinkers will always find new ideas, scholars
new methods and systems, artists new aesthetic
creations, but on the whole everything must
remain the same. Only when woman heeds the
message which life proclaims to her, that,
through her, salvation must come — ^will the face
of the earth be renewed. Oratorical talk of
the high task of mothers and of the great pro-
fession of education are empty phrases, un-
til we see that the possibility of humanity and
civilisation winning some day the victory over
savagery depends on the physiological and
psychological transformation of man*s nature.
This transformation requires an entirely new
conception of the vocation of mother, a tre-
mendous effort of will, continuous inspiration.
Those who believe they can fulfil their duties
as mothers and at the same time can accom-
plish other valuable work have never made
the experiment of education. The long con-
tinued habit of alternately caressing and strik-
ing one's children is not education. It needs
tremendous power to do one's duty to a single
child. This by no means signifies giving up
to the child every hour of one's time, but it
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102 The Century of the Child
does mean that our soul is to be filled by the
child, just as the man of science is possessed
by his investigations and the artist by his work.
The child should be in one's thoughts when one
is sitting at home or walking along the road,
when one is lying down or when one is stand-
ing up. This devotion, much more than the
hours immediately given to one's children, is
the absorbing thing; the occupation which
makes an earnest mother always go to any ex-
ternal activity with divided soul and dissipated
energy. Therefore the mother, if she gives her
children the share they need, can devote to
social activities only her occasional attention.
And f ot the same reason she should be entirely
free from working to earn her living during
the most critical years of the children's
training.
Neither in the upper nor in the lower classes,
have I ever heard of any mother forced to do
work of this kind or one engaged in artistic
productions through the stimulus of her tal-
ents, who was able to satisfy her children in
the period when they were growing up.
Adele Gerhard and Helen Simon under the
title of Motherhood and Intellectual Work
published a very interesting investigation in
which I found my own observations substan-
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 103
tiated. The book showed that a mother who
wished to train her children and at the same
time engage in an occupation, or take part in
some public activity, could give to neither her
whole personality. The result is a mediocre
education for the children and for herself;
mediocre work done with a divided soul. This
is allowed to be true by all of those really
conscientious mothers who have maintained a
high aim in their work and in the bringing up
of their children. They are dilettantes in
both directions; what they do is half done
owing to the effort to imite two separate fields
of work.
From the point of view of women's rights,
it is said, in reply to these opinions of mine, that
motherhood can be made infinitely easier by a
natural method of life, that work can be very
well combined with it. It is said that children
soon grow out of needing the protection of
their mother, that the mothers can then devote
themselves entirely to their work. They con-
tend besides that motherhood is no uncondi-
tional obligation; that people are fully justified
in making different individual arrangements;
one woman wishes to become a mother,
another not. The one gets married with the
hope of becoming a mother; the other with the
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resolution of avoiding maternity. The third
does not marry at all. Attempts to generalise
on this matter in which individual freedom has
every right to be recognised, they consider re-
actionary. Full freedom for the woman, mar-
ried or unmarried, to choose her work and to
continue it; full freedom to choose motherhood
or to do without it, this they say is the way to
free woman, this is the line of progress. Here
woman is subject to that economic law which
has made it necessary for her to work for her
own living. Just as woman's household work
has been superseded by factory work, so too,
they say, will the maternal obligations of
woman be fulfilled collectively, and the difficul-
ties on which the so-called reactionary mem-
bers of the women's rights movement base
their arguments, will in the future only arise
in exceptional cases. As regards these argu-
ments, I have already shown that I recognise
fully the right of the feminine individual to
go her own way, to choose her own fortune or
misfortune. I have always spoken of women
collectively and of society collectively.
From this general, not from the individual
standpoint, I am trying to convince women
that vengeance is being exacted on the individ-
ual, on the race, when woman gradually de-
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Unborn Race and Woman's Work 105
stroys the deepest vital source of her physical
and psychical being, the power of motherhood.
But present-day woman is not adapted to
motherhood; she will only be fitted for it when
she has trained herself for motherhood and
man is trained for fatherhood. Then man and
woman can begin together to bring up the new
generation out of which some day society will
be formed. In it, the completed man — ^the
Superman — ^will be bathed in that sunshine
whose distant rays but colour the horizon of
to-day.
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CHAPTER III
EDUCATION
GrOETHE showcd loDg ago in his Werther a
clear understanding of the significance of in-
dividualistic and psychological training, an
appreciation which will mark the century of
the child. In this work he shows how the fu-
ture power of will lies hidden in the character-
istics of the child, and how along with every
fault of the child an uncorrupted germ capable
of producing good is enclosed. "Always,"
he says, "I repeat the golden words of the
teacher of mankind, ' if ye do not become as
one of these,' and now, good friend, those who
are our equals, whom we should look upon as
our models, we treat as subjects; they should
have no will of their own; do we have none?
Where is our prerogative? Does it consist in
the fact that we are older and more experi-
enced? Good God of Heaven! Thou seest
old and young children, nothing else. And in
whom Thou hast more joy. Thy Son announced
ages ago. But people believe in Him and do
not hear Him — ^that, too, is an old trouble,
io6
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Education 107
and they model their children after themselves."
The same criticism might be applied to our
present educators, who constantly have on
their tongues such words as evolution, indi-
viduality, and natural tendencies, but do not
heed the new conmaandments in which they say
they believe. They continue to educate as if
they believed still in the natural depravity of
man, in original sin, which may be bridled,
tamed, suppressed, but not changed. The new
belief is really equivalent to Goethe's thoughts
given above, i.e.j that almost every fault is but
a hard shell enclosing the genn of virtue.
Even men of modem times still follow in edu-
cation the old rule of medicine, that evil must
be driven out by evil', instead of the new
method, the system of allowing nature quietly
and slowly to help itself, taking care only
that the surrounding conditions help the work
of nature. This is education.
Neither harsh nor tender parents suspect the
truth expressed by Carlyle when he said that
the marks of a noble and original tempera-
ment are wild, strong emotions, that must be
controlled by a discipline as hard as steel.
People either strive to root out passions
altogether, or they abstain from teaching the
child to get them under control.
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To suppress the real personality of the child,
and to supplant it with another personahty
continues to be a pedagogical crime common
to those who announce loudly that education
should only develop the real individual nature
of the child.
They are still not convinced that egoism on
the part of the child is justified. Just as httle
are they convinced of the possibility that evil
can be changed into good.
Education must be based on the certainty
that faults cannot be atoned for, or blotted
out, but must always have their consequences.
At the same time, there is the other certainty,
that through progressive evolution, by slow
adaptation to the conditions of environment
they may be transformed. Only when this
stage is reached will education begin to be a
science and art. We will then give up all be-
lief in the miraculous effects of sudden inter-
ference; we shall act in the psychological
sphere in accordance with the principle of the
indestructibility of matter. We shall never
believe that a characteristic of the soul can be
destroyed. There are but two possibilities.
Either it can be brought into subjection or it
can be raised up to a higher plane.
Madame de StaeFs words show much in-
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Education 109
sight when she says that only the people who
can play with children are able to educate
them. For success in training children the
first condition is to become as a child oneself,
but this means no assumed childishness, no
condescending baby-talk that the child im-
mediately sees through and deeply abhors.
What it does mean is to be as entirely and
simply taken up with the child as the child
himself is absorbed by his life. It means to
treat the child as really one's equal, that is, to
show him the same consideration, the same
kind confidence one shows to an adult. It
means not to influence the child to be what we
ourselves desire him to become but to be in-
fluenced by the impression of what the child
himself is; not to treat the child with decep-
tion, or by the exercise of force, but with the
seriousness and sincerity proper to his own
character.
Somewhere Rousseau says that all education
has failed in that nature does not fashion par-
ents as educators nor children for the sake of
education. What would happen if we finally
succeeded in following the directions of nature,
and recognised that the great secret of educa-
tion lies hidden in the maxim, "do not
educate"?
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Not leaving the child in peace is the great-
est evil of present-day methods of training
children. Education is determined to create
a beautiful world externally and internally in
which the child can grow. To let him move
about freely in this world imtil he comes into
contact with the permanent boundaries of an-
other's right will be the end of the education
of the future. Only then will adults really
obtain a deep insight into the souls of children,
now an almost inaccessible kingdom. For it
is a natural instinct of self-preservation which
causes the child to bar the educator from his
innermost nature. There is the person who
asks rude questions; for example, what is the
child thinking about? a question which almost
invariably is answered with a black or a white
lie. The child must protect himself from an
educator who would master his thoughts and
inclinations, or rudely handle them, who with-
out consideration betrays or makes ridiculous
his most sacred feelings, who exposes faults
or praises characteristics before strangers, or
even uses an open-hearted, confidential con-
fession as an occasion for reproof at another
time.
The statement that no hiunan being learns
to understand another, or at least to be pa-
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Education m
tient with another, is true above all of the in-
timate relation of child and parent in which,
understanding, the deepest characteristic of
love, is almost always absent.
Parents do not see that during the whole
life the need of peace is never greater than in
the years of childhood, an inner peace under
all external imrest. The child has to enter
into relations with his own infinite world, to
conquer it, to make it the object of his dreams.
But what does he experience? Obstacles, in-
terference, corrections, the whole livelong
day. The child is always required to leave
something alone, or to do something different,
to find something different, or want something
different from what he does, or finds, or wants.
He is always shunted off in another direction
from that towards which his own character is
leading him. All of this is caused by our
tenderness, vigilance, and zeal, in directing,
advising, and helping the small specimen of
humanity to become a complete example in a
model series.
I have heard a three-year-old child char-
acterised as " trying " because he wanted to go
into the woods, whereas the nursemaid wished
to drag him into the city. Another child of
six years was disciplined because she had been
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112 The Century of the Child
naughty to a playmate and had called her a
little pig, — a natural appellation for one who
was always dirty. These are typical ex-
amples of how the sound instincts of the child
are dulled. It was a spontaneous utterance
of the childish heart when a small boy, after
an account of the heaven of good children,
asked his mother whether she did not believe
that, after he had been good a whole week
in heaven, he might be allowed to go to hell
on Saturday evening to play with the bad Ut-
tle boys there.
The child felt in its innermost consciousness
that he had a right to be naughty, a funda-
mental right which is accorded to adults; and
not only to be naughty, but to be naughty in
peace, to be left to the dangers and joys of
naughtiness.
To call forth from this " unvirtue '' the com-
plimentary virtue is to overcome evil with
good. Otherwise we overcome natural
strength by weak means and obtain artificial
virtues which will not stand the tests which
life imposes.
It seems simple enough when we say that
We must overcome evil with good, but practi-
cally no process is more involved, or more
tedious, than to find actual means to accom-
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Education 113
plish this end. It is much easier to say what
one shall not do than what one must do to
change self-will into strength of character, sly-
ness into prudence, the desire to please into
amiability, restlessness into personal initiative.
It can only be brought about by recognising
that evil, in so far as it is not atavistic or per-
verse, is as natural and indispensable as the
good, and that it becomes a permanent evil
only through its one-sided supremacy.
The educator wants the child to be finished
at once, and perfect. He forces upon the child
an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devo-
tion to duty, a sense of honoiu*, habits that
adults get out of with astonishing rapidity.
Where the faults of children are concerned, at
home and in school, we strain at gnats, while
children daily are obliged to swallow the camels
of grown people.
The art of natm-al education consists in ig-
noring the faults of children nine times out of
ten, in avoiding immediate interference, which
is usually a mistake, and devoting one's whole
vigilance to the control of the environment in
which the child is growing up, to watching
the education which is allowed to go on by it-
self. But educators who, day in and day out,
are consciously transforming the environment
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114 The Century of the Child
and themselves are still a rare product. Most
people live on the capital and interest of an
education, which perhaps once made them
model children, but has deprived them of the
desire for educating themselves. Only by
keeping oneself in constant process of growth,
imder the constant influence of the best things
in one's own age, does one become a companion
half-way good enough for one's children.
To bring up a child means carrying one's
soul in one's hand, setting one's feet on a nar-
row path; it means never placing ourselves in
danger of meeting the cold look on the part
of the child that tells us without words that he
finds us insufiicient and unreliable. It means
the hvmible reaUsation of the truth that the
ways of injuring the child are infinite, while
the ways of being useful to him are few. How
seldom does the educator remember that the
child, even at four or five years of age, is mak-
ing experiments with adults, seeing through
them, with marvellous shrewdness making his
own valuations and reacting sensitively to each
impression. The sUghtest mistrust, the small-
est unkindness, the least act of injustice or
contemptuous ridicule, leave wounds that last
for life in the finely strung soul of the child.
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Education us
While on the other side unexpected friendli-
ness, kind advances, just indignation, make
quite as deep an impression on those senses
which people tenn as soft as wax but treat as
if they were made of cowhide.
Relatively most excellent was the old edu-
cation which consisted solely in keeping one-
self whole, pure, and honourable. For it did
not at least depreciate personality, although
it did not form it. It would be well if but a
hundredth part of the pains now taken by
parents were given to interference with the
life of the child and the rest of the ninety and
nine employed in leading, without interfer-
ence, in acting as an unforeseen, an invisible
providence through which the child obtains ex-
perience, from which he may draw his own
conclusions. The present practice is to im-
press one's own discoveries, opinions, and prin-
ciples on the child by constantly directing his
actions. The last thing to be realised by the
educator is that he really has before him an
entirely new soul, a real self whose first and
chief right is to think over the things with
which he comes in contact. By a new soul he
imderstands only a new generation of an old
humanity to be treated with a fresh dose of the
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old remedy. We teach the new souls not to
steal, not to lie, to save their clothes, to learn
their lessons, to economise their money, to
obey commands, not to contradict older peo-
ple, say their prayers, to fight occasionally in
order to be strong. But who teaches the new
souls to choose for themselves the path they
must tread? Who thinks that the desire for
this path of their own can be so profound
that a hard or even mild pressiu'e towards
uniformity can make the whole of childhood
a torment.
The child comes into life with the inherit-
ance of the preceding members of the race;
and this inheritance is modified by adaptation
to the environment. But the child shows also
individual variations from the type of the
species, and if his own character is not to dis-
appear during the process of adaptation, all
self-determined development of energy must
be aided in every way and only indirectly in-
fluenced by the teacher, who should im-
derstand how to combine and emphasise the
results of this development.
Interference on the part of the educator,
whether by force or persuasion, weakens
this development if it does not destroy it
altogether.
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Education 117
The habits of the household, and the child's
habits in it must be absolutely fixed if they
are to be of any value. Amiel truly says that
habits are principles which have become in-
stincts, and have passed over into flesh and
blood. To change habits, he continues, means
to attack life in its very essence, for life is only
a web of habits.
Why does everything remain essentially the
same from generation to generation? Why
do highly civilised Christian people continue
to plunder one another and call it exchange,
to murder one another en masse, and call it
nationalism, to oppress one another and call it
statesmanship?
Because in every new generation the im-
pulses supposed to have been rooted out by
discipline in the child, break forth again, when
the struggle for existence — of the individual
in society, of the society in the life of the state
— ^begins. These passions are not transformed
by the prevalent education of the day, but only
repressed. Practically this is the reason why
not a single savage passion has been overcome
in humanity. Perhaps man-eating may be
mentioned as an exception. But what is told
of Em-opean ship companies or Siberian pris-
oners shows that even this impulse, under
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conditions favourable to it, may be revived,
although in the majority of people a deep
physical antipathy to man-eating is innate.
Conscious incest, despite similar deviations,
must also be physically contrary to the ma-
jority, and in a nvmiber of women, modesty —
the unity between body and soul in relation to
love — ^is an incontestable provision of nature.
So too a minority would find it physically im-
possible to murder or steal. With this list I
have exhausted everjrthing which mankind,
since its conscious history began, has really so
intimately acquired that the achievement is
passed on in its flesh and blood. Only this
kind of conquest can really stand up against
temptation in every form.
A deep physiological truth is hidden in the
use of language when one speaks of un-
chained passions; the passions, under the pre-
vailing system of education, are really only
beasts of prey imprisoned in cages.
While fine words are spoken about individ-
ual development, children are treated as if
their personality had no purpose of its own,
as if they were made only for the pleasure,
pride, and comfort of their parents; and as
these aims are best advanced when children be-
come like every one else, people usually begin
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Education 119
by attempting to make them respectable and
useful members of society.
But the only correct starting point, so far
as a child's education in becoming a social hu-
man being is concerned, is to treat him as such,
while strengthening his natural disposition to
become an individual human being.
The new educator will, by regularly or-
dered experience, teach the child by degrees
his place in the great orderly system of exist-
ence; teach him his responsibility towards his
environment. But in other respects, none of
the individual characteristics of the child ex-
pressive of his life will be suppressed, so long
as they do not injure the child himself, or
others. The right balance must be kept be-
tween Spencer's definition of life as an adapta-
tion to surrounding conditions, and Nietzsche's
definition of it as the will to secure power.
In adaptation, imitation certainly plays a
great role, but individual exercise of power
is just as important. Through adaptation life
attains a fixed form; through exercise of power,
new factors.
Thoughtful people, as I have already stated,
talk a good deal about personality. But they
are, nevertheless, filled with doubts when their
children are not just like all other children;
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when they cannot show in their oflPspring all
the ready-made virtues required by society.
And so they drill their children, repressing in
childhood the natural instincts which will have
freedom when they are grown. People still
hardly realise how new human beings are
formed; therefore the old types constantly
repeat themselves in the same circle, — ^the fine
yoimg men, the sweet girls, the respectable
ofiicials, and so on. And new types with
higher ideals, — ^travellers on unknown paths,
thinkers of yet unthought thoughts, people
capable of the crime of inaugurating new
ways, — ^such types rarely come into existence
among those who are well brought up.
Nature herself, it is true, repeats the main
types constantly. But she also constantly
makes small deviations. In this way different
species, even of the human race, have come
into existence. But man himself does not yet
see the significance of this natural law in his
own higher development. He wants the feel-
ings, thoughts, and judgments already stamped
with approval to be reproduced by each new
generation. So we get no new individuals,
but only more or less prudent, stupid, amiable,
or bad-tempered examples of the genus
man. The still living instincts of the
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Education 121
ape, double, in the ease of man, the eflfect
of heredity. Conservatism is for the present
stronger in mankind than the effort to pro-
duce new types. But this last characteristic
is the most valuable. The educator should do
anything but advise the child to do what every-
body does. He should rather rejoice when he
sees in the child tendencies to deviation.
Using other people's opinion as a standard re-
sults in subordinating one's self to their
will. So we become a part of the great mass,
led by the Superman through the strength of
his will, a will which could not have mastered
strong personalities. It has been justly re-
marked that individual peoples, like the Eng-
lish, have attained the greatest political and
social freedom, because the personal feeling of
independence is far in excess of freedom in a
legal form. Accordingly legal freedom has
been constantly growing.
For the progress of the whole of the species,
as well as of society, it is essential that educa-
tion shall awake the feeling of independence;
it should invigorate and favour the disposition
to deviate from the type in those cases where
the rights of others are not affected, or where
deviation is not simply the result of the desire
to draw attention to oneself. The child should
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122 The Century of the Child
be given the chance to declare conscientiously
his independence of a customary usage, of an
ordinary feeling, for this is the foundation of
the education of an individual, as well as the
basis of a collective conscience, which is the only
kind of conscience men now have. What does
having an individual conscience mean? It
means submitting voluntarily to an external
law, attested and found good by my own con-
science. It means unconditionally heeding
the unwritten law, which I lay upon myself,
and following this inner law even when I must
stand alone against the whole world.
It is a frequent phenomenon, we can al-
most call it a regular one, that it is original
natures, particularly talented beings, who are
badly treated at home and in school. No one
considers the sources of conduct in a child who
shows fear or makes a noise, or who is ab-
sorbed in himself, or who has an impetuous
nature. Mothers and teachers show in this
their pitiable incapacity for the most elemen-
tary part in the art of education, that is, to be
able to see with their own eyes, not with peda-
gogical doctrines in their head.
I naturally expect in the supporters of so-
ciety, with their conventional morality, no
appreciation of the significance of the child's
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Education 123
putting into exercise his own powers. Just
as little is this to be expected of those Christ-
ian believers who think that human nature
must be brought to repentance and hmnility,
and that the sinful body, the unclean beast,
must be tamed with the rod, — a theory which
the Bible is brought to support.
I am only addressing people who can think
new thoughts and consequently should cease
using old methods of education. This class
may reply that the new ideas in education
cannot be carried out. But the obstacle is
simply that their new thoughts have not made
them into new men; the old man in them has
neither repose, nor time, nor patience, to form
his own soul, and that of the child, according
to the new thoughts.
Those who have " tried Spencer and failed,"
because Spencer's method demands intelli-
gence and patience, contend that the child
must be taught to obey, that truth lies in the
old rule, "As the twig is bent the tree is
inclined."
Bent is the appropriate word, bent accord-
ing to the old ideal which extinguishes person-
ality, teaches humility and obedience. But
the new ideal is that man, to stand straight and
upright, must not be bent at all, only sup-
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124 The Century of the Child
ported, and so prevented from being def onned
by weakness.
One often finds, in the modem system of
training, the crude desire for mastery still
alive and breaking out when the child is ob-
stinate. "You won't I" say father and
mother; " I will teach you whether you have
a will. I will soon drive self-will out of you."
But nothing can be driven out of the child; on
the other hand, much can be scourged into it
which should be kept far away.
Only during the first few years of life is a
kind of drill necessary, as a pre-condition to
a higher training. The child is then in such
a high degree controlled by sensation, that a
slight physical pain or pleasure is often the
only language he fully understands. Conse-
quently for some children discipline is an in-
dispensable means of enforcing the practice
of certain habits. For other children, the
stricter methods are entirely imnecessary even
at this early age, and as soon as the child can
remember a blow, he is too old to receive one.
The child must certainly learn obedience,
and, besides, this obedience must be absolute.
If such obedience has become habitual from
the tenderest age, a look, a word, an intona-
tion is enough to keep the child straight. The
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Education 125
dissatisfaction of those who are bringing him
up can only be made eflPective when it falls
as a shadow in the usual simny atmosphere of
home. And if people refrain from laying the
foundations of obedience while the child is
small, and his naughtiness is entertaining,
Spencer's method undoubtedly will be found
unsuitable after the child is older and his ca-
price disagreeable.
With a very small child, one should not
argue, but act consistently and inunediately.
The eflfort of training should be directed at an
early period to arrange the experiences in a
consistent whole of impressions according to
Rousseau and Spencer's recommendation.
So certain habits will become impressed in the
flesh and blood of the child.
Constant crying on the part of small child-
ren must be corrected when it has become clear
that the crying is not caused by illness or some
other discomfort, — discomforts against which
crying is the child's only weapon. Crying is
now ordinarily corrected by blows. But this
does not master the will of the child, and only
produces in his soul the idea that older people
strike small children, when small children cry.
This is not an ethical idea. But when the cry-
ing child is inunediately isolated, and it is
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126 The Century of the Child
explained to him at the same time that whoever
annoys others must not be with them; if this
isolation is the absolute result, and cannot
be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid
for the experience that one must be alone when
one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable.
In both cases the child is silenced by interfer-
ing with his comfort; but one type of discom-
fort is the exercise of force on his will; the
other produces slowly the self-mastery of the
will, and accomplishes this by a good motive.
One method encourages a base emotion, fear.
The other corrects the will in a way that com-
bines it with one of the most important ex-
periences of life. The one punishment keeps
the child on the level of the animal. The other
impresses upon him the great principle of hu-
man social life, that when our pleasure causes
displeasure to others, other people hinder us
from following our pleasures; or withdraw
themselves from the exercise of our self-will.
It is necessary that small children should ac-
custom themselves to good behaviour at table,
etc. If every time an act of naughtiness is
repeated, the child is immediately taken away,
he will soon learn that whoever is disagreeable
to others must remain alone. Thus a right
application is made of a right principle.
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Education 127
Small children, too, must learn not to touch
what belongs to other people. If every time
anything is touched without pennission,
children lose their freedom of action one way
or another, they soon learn that a condition
of their free action is not to injiu^ others.
It is quite true, as a yoimg mother re-
marked, that empty Japanese rooms are ideal
places in which to bring up children. Our
modern crowded rooms are, so far as child-
ren are concerned, to be condemned. During
the year in which the real education of the
child is proceeding by touching, tasting, biting,
feeling, and so on, every moment he is
hearing the cry, " Let it alone.'' For the tem-
perament of the child as well as for the develop-
ment of his powers, the best thing is a large,
light nursery, adorned with handsome litho-
graphs, wood-cuts, and so on, provided with
some simple furniture, where he may enjoy
the fullest freedom of movement. But if the
child is there with his parents and is disobedi-
ent, a momentary reprimand is the best means
to teach him to reverence the greater world in
which the will of others prevails, the world in
which the child certainly can make a place for
himself but must also learn that every place
occupied by him has its limits.
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128 The Century of the Child
If it is a case of a danger, which it is desir-
able that the child should really dread, we mu^t
allow the thing itself to have an alarming in-
fluence. When a mother strikes a child be-
cause he touches the light, the result is that he
does this again when the mother is away. But
let him bum himself with the light, then he is
certain to leave it alone. In riper years when
a boy misuses a knife, a toy, or something simi-
lar, the loss of the object for the time being
must be the punishment. Most boys would
prefer corporal punishment to the loss of their
favourite possession. [But only the loss of it
will be a real education through experience of
one of the inevitable rules of life, an experience
which cannot be too strongly impressed.
We hear parents who have begun with
Spencer and then have taken to corporal pim-
ishment declare that when children are too
small to repair the clothing which they have
torn there must be some other kind of punish-
ment. But at that age they should not be pun-
ished at all for such things. They should have
such simple and strong clothes that they can
play freely in them. Later on, when they can
be really careful, the natural punishment
would be to have the child remain at home if
he is careless, has spotted his clothes, or torn
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Education 129
them. He must be shown that he must help
to put his clothes in good condition again, or
that he will be compelled to buy what he has
destroyed carelessly with money earned by him-
self. If the child is not careful, he must stay
at home, when ordinarily allowed to go out,
or eat alone if he is too late for meals. It may
be said that there are simple means by which
all the important habits of social life may be-
come a second nature. But it is not possible
in all cases to apply Spencer's method. The
natural consequences occasionally endanger
the health of the child, or sometimes are too
slow in their action. If it seems necessary to
interfere directly, such action must be con-
sistent, quick, and immutable. How is it that
the child learns very soon that fire burns?
Because fire does so always. But the mother
who at one time strikes, at another threatens,
at another bribes the child, first forbids and
then inunediately after permits some action;
who does not carry out her threat, does not
compel obedience, but constantly gabbles and
scolds; who sometimes acts in one way and
just as often in another, has not learned the
eflfective educational methods of the fire.
The old-fashioned strict training that in its
crude way gave to the character a fixed type
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rested on its consistent qualities. It was con-
sistently strict, not as at present a lax hesita-
tion between all kinds of pedagogical methods
and psychological opinions, in which the cMld
is thrown about here and there Uke a ball, in
the hands of grown people; at one time pushed
forward, then laughed at, then pushed aside,
only to be brought back again, kissed till it
is disgusted, first ordered about, and then
coaxed. A grown man would become insane
if joking Titans treated him for a single day
as a cMd is treated for a year. A child
should not be ordered about, but should be
just as courteously addressed as a grown per-
son in order that he may learn courtesy. A
child should never be pushed into notice, never
compelled to endure caresses, never over-
whelmed with kisses, which ordinarily tor-
ment him and are often the cause of sexual
hyperesthesia. The child's demonstrations of
affection should be reciprocated when they
are sincere, but one's own demonstrations
should be reserved for special occasions. This
is one of the many excellent maxims of
training that are disregarded. Nor should
the child be forced to express regret in begging
pardon and the like. This is excellent train-
ing for hypocrisy. A small child once had
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Education 131
been rude to his elder brother and was placed
upon a chair to repent his fault. When the
mother after a time asked if he was sorry, he
answered, " Yes," with emphasis, but as the
mother saw a mutinous sparkle in his eyes she
felt impelled to ask, " Sorry for what? " and
the youngster broke out, " Sorry that I did
not call him a liar besides." The mother was
wise enough on this occasion, and ever after,
to give up insisting on repentance.
Spontaneous penitence is full of signifi-
cance; it is a deeply felt desire for pardon.
But an artificial emotion is always and every-
where worthless. Are you not sorry? Does
it make no diflference to you that your mother
is ill, your brother dead, your father away
from home? Such expressions are often used
as an appeal to the emotions of children. But
children have a right to have feelings, or not
have them, and to have them as undisturbed as
grown people. The same holds good of their
sympathies and antipathies. The sensitive
feelings of children are constantly injured by
lack of consideration on the part of grown peo-
ple, their easily stimulated aversions are con-
stantly being brought out. But the suflferings
of children through the crudeness of their
elders belong to an unwritten chapter of child
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132 The Century of the Child
psychology. Just as there are few better
methods of training than to ask children, when
they have behaved unjustly to others, to con-
sider whether it would be pleasant for them
to be treated in that way, so there is no better
corrective for the trainer of children than the
habit of asking oneself, in question small and
great, — ^Would I consent to be treated as I
have just treated my child? If it were only
remembered that the child generally suffers
double as much as the adult, parents would
perhaps learn physical and psychical tender-
ness without which a child's life is a constant
torment.
As to presents, the same principle holds
good as with emotions and marks of tender-
ness. Only by example can generous instincts
be provoked. Above all the child should not
be allowed to have things which he inunediately
gives away. Gifts to a child should always
imply a personal requital for work or sacrifice.
In order to secure for children the pleasure of
giving and the opportunity of obtaining small
pleasures and enjoyments, as well as of re-
placing property of their own or of others
which they may have destroyed, they should at
an early age be accustomed to perform seri-
ously certain household duties for which they
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Education 133
receive some small remimeration. But small
occasional services, whether volunteered or
asked for by others, should never be rewarded.
Only readiness to serve, without payment, de-
velops the joy of generosity. When the child
wants to give away something, people should
not make a pretence of receiving it. This
produces the false conception in his mind that
the pleasure of being generous can be had for
nothing. At every step the child should be
allowed to meet the real experiences of life;
the thorns should never be plucked from his
roses. This is what is least understood in
present-day training. Thus we see reasonable
methods constantly failing. People find
themselves forced to " afflictive *' methods
which stand in no relation with the realities of
life. I mean, above all, what are still called
means of education, instead of means of tor-
ture, — ^blows.
Many people of to-day defend blows, main-
taining that they are milder means of punish-
ment than the natural consequences of an
act; that blows have the strongest eflfect on
the memory, which effect becomes permanent
through association of ideas.
But what kinds of association? Is it not
with physical pain and shame? Gradually, step
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134 The Century of the Child
by step, this method of training and discipline
has been superseded in all its forms. The
movement to aboHsh torture, imprisonment,
and corporal punishment failed for a long time
owing to the conviction that they were indis-
pensable as methods of discipline. But the
child, people answer, is still an animal, he must
be brought up as an animal. Those who talk
in this way know nothing of children nor of
animals. Even animals can be trained with-
out striking them, but they can only be trained
by men who have become men themselves.
Others come forward with the doctrine that
terror and pain have been the best means of
educating mankind, so the child must pursue
the same road as humanity. This is an utter
absurdity. We should also, on this theory,
teach our children, as a natural introduction
to religion, to practise fetish worship. If
the child is to reproduce all the lower de-
velopment stages of the race, he would be
practically depressed beneath the level which
he has reached physiologically and psycho-
logically through the conmion inheritance
of the race. If we have abandoned torture
and painful pimishments for adults, while
they are retained for children, it is because we
have not yet seen that their soul life so far as
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Education 135
a greater and more subtle capacity for suflPer-
ing is concerned has made the same progress
as that of adult mankind. The numerous
cases of child suicide in the last decade were
often the result of fear of corporal pmiishment;
or have taken place after its administration.
Both soul and body are equally affected by
this practice. Where this is not the result,
blows have even more dangerous consequences.
They tend to dull still further the feeling of
shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice
of the person pmiished. I once heard a child
pointed out in a school as being so imruly
that it was generally agreed he would be bene-
fited by a flogging. Then it was discovered
that his father's flogging at home had made
him what he was. If statistics were prepared
of ruined sons, those who had been flogged
would certainly be more numerous than those
who had been pampered.
Society has gradually given up employing
retributive pmiishments because people have
seen that they neither awaken the feeling of
guilt, nor act as a deterrent, but on the contrary
retribution applied by equal to equal brutal-
ises the ideas of right, hardens the temper, and
stimulates the victim to exercise the same vio-
lence towards others that has been endured
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136 The Century of the Child
by himself. But other rules are applied to the
psychological processes of the child. When
a child strikes his small sister the mother
strikes him and beUeves that he will see and
understand the difference between the blows
he gets and those he gives; that he will see that
the one is a just punishment and the other
vicious conduct. But the child is a sharp
logician and feels that the action is just the
same, although the mother gives it a different
name.
Corporal punishment was long ago admir-
ably described by Comenius, who compared
an educator using this method with a musician
striking a badly tuned instrument with his
fist, instead of using his ears and his hands to
put it into tune.
These brutal attacks work on the active sen-
sitive feelings, lacerating and confusing them.
They have no educative power on all the in-
numerable fine processes in the life of the
child's soul, on their obscurely related com-
binations.
In order to give real training, the first thing
after the second or third year is to abandon
the very thought of a blow among the possi-
bilities of education. It is best if parents, as
soon as the child is born, agree never to strike
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Education 137
him, for if they once begin with this con-
venient and easy method, they continue to use
corporal discipline even contrary to their first
intention, because they have failed wjiile using
such punishment to develop the child's in-
telligence.
If people do not see this it is no more use to
speak to them of education than it would be
to talk to a cannibal about the world's peace.
But as these savages in educational matters
are often civilised human beings in other re-
spects, I should like to request them to think
over the development of marriage from the
time when man wooed with a club and when
woman was regarded as the soulless property
of man, only to be kept in order by blows, a
view which continued to be held until modern
times. Through a thousand daily secret in-
fluences, our feelings and ideas have been so
transformed that these crude conceptions have
disappeared, to the great advantage of society
and the individual. But it may be hard to
awaken a pedagogical savage to the convic-
tion that, in quite the same way, a thousand
new secret and mighty influences will change
our crude methods of education, when parents
once come to see that parenthood must go
through the same transformation as marriage.
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138 The Century of the Child
before it attains to a noble and complete
development.
Only when men realise that whipping a
child belongs to the same low stage of civilisa-
tion as beating a woman, or a servant, or as
the corporal pimishment of soldiers and crimi-
nals, will the first real preparation begin of the
material from which perhaps later an educator
may be formed.
Corporal punishment was natural in rough
times. The body is tangible; what affects it
has an immediate and perceptible result. The
heat of passion is cooled by the blows it ad-
ministers; in a certain stage of development
blows are the natural expression of moral in-
dignation, the direct method by which the
moral will impresses itself on beings of lower
capacities. But it has since been discovered
that the soul may be impressed by spiritual
means, and that blows are just as demoralising
for the one who gives them as for the one who
receives them.
The educator, too, is apt to forget that the
child in many cases has as few moral concep-
tions as the animal or the savage. To punish
for this — ^is only a cruelty, and to punish by
brutal methods is a piece of stupidity. It
works against the possibility of elevating the
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Education 139
child beyond the lerel of the beast or the sav-
age. The educator to whose mind flogging
never presents itself, even as an occasional re-
source, will naturally direct his whole thought
to finding psychological methods of education.
Administering corporal punishment demor-
alises and stupefies the educator, for it in-
creases his thoughtlessness, not his patience,
his brutality, not his intelligence.
A small boy friend of mine when four years
old received his first pimishment of this kind;
happily it was his only one. As his nurse re-
minded him in the evening to say his prayers
he broke out, "Yes, to-night I really have
something to tell God," and prayed with deep
earnestness, " Dear God, tear mamma's arms
out so that she cannot beat me any more."
• Nothing would more effectively further the
development of education than for all flogging
pedagogues to meet this fate. They would
then learn to educate with the head instead
of with the hand. And as to public educa-
tors, the teachers, their position could be no
better raised than by legally forbidding a blow
to be administered in any school under penalty
of final loss of position.
That people who are in other respects in-
telligent and sensitive continue to defend
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I40 The Century of the Child
flogging, is due to the fact that most educa-
tors have only a very elementary conception
of their work. They should constantly keep
before them the feelings and impressions of
their own childhood in dealing with children.
The most frequent as well as the most danger-
ous of the numerous mistakes made in hand-
ling children is that people do not remember
how they felt themselves at a similar age, that
they do not regard and comprehend the feel-
ings of the child from their own past point of
view. The adult laughs or smiles in remem-
bering the punishments and other things
which caused him in his childhood anxious
days or nights, which produced the silent tor-
ture of the child's heart, infinite despondency,
burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged
sense of justice, the terrible creations of his
imagination, his absurd shame, his unsatis-
fied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness.
Lacking these beneficent memories, adults con-
stantly repeat the crime of destroying the
childhood of the new generation, — ^the only
time in life in which the guardian of education
can really be a kindly providence. So strongly
do I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of
children are unnatural as well as ignoble that
I experience physical disgust in touching the
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Education 141
hand of a human being that I know has struck
a child; and I cannot close my eyes after I
have heard a child in the street threatened with
corporal punishment.
Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not
those of freemen. As early as Walther von
der Vogelweide, it was known that the hon-
ourable man respects a word more than a blow.
The exercise of physical force delivers the
weak and unprotected into the hands of the
strong. A child never believes in his heart,
though he may be brought to acknowledge
verbally, that the blows were due to love, that
they were administered because they were
necessary. The child is too keen not to know
that such a " must '* does not exist, and that
love can express itself in a better way.
Lack of self -discipline, of intelligence, of
patience, of personal effort — ^these are the
corner-stones on which corporal punishment
rests. I do not now refer to the system of
flogging employed by miserable people year
in and year out at home, or, particularly in
schools, that of beating children outrageously,
or to the limits of brutality. I do not mean
even the less brutal blows administered by un-
disciplined teachers and parents, who avenge
themselves in excesses of passion or fatigue or
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142 The Century of the Child
disgust, — ^blows which are simply the active
expression of a tension of nerves, a detestable
evidence of the want of self -discipline and self -
culture. Still less do I refer to the cruelties
committed by monsters, sexual perverts, whose
brutal tendencies are stimulated by their dis-
ciplinary power and who use it to force their
victims to silence, as certain criminal trials
have shown.
I am only speaking of conscientious, amiable
parents and teachers who, with pain to them-
selves, fulfil what they regard as their duty
to the child. These are accustomed to adduce
the good eflPects of corporal discipline as a
proof that it cannot be dispensed with. The
child by being whipped is, they say, not only
made good but freed from his evil character,
and shows by his whole being that this quick
and siunmary method of punishment has done
more than talks, and patience, and the slowly
working penalties of experience. Examples
are adduced to prove that only this kind of
punishment breaks down obstinacy, cures the
habit of lying and the like. Those who adopt
this system do not perceive that they have only
succeeded, through this momentarily effective
means, in repressing the external expression
of an evil will. They have not succeeded in
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Education 143
transf onning the will itself. It requires con-
stant vigilance, daily self -discipline, to create
an ever higher capacity for the discovery of
intelligent methods. The fault that is re-
pressed is certain to appear on every occasion
when the child dares to show it. The educator
who finds in corporal punishment a short way
to get rid of trouble, leads the child a long
way round, if we have the only real develop-
ment in view, namely that which gradually
strengthens the child's capacity for self-con-
trol.
I have never heard a child over three years
old threatened with corporal punishment with-
out noticing that this wonderfully moral
method had an equally bad influence on parents
and children. The same can be said of milder
kinds of folly? coaxing children by external
rewards. I have seen some children coaxed
to take baths and others compelled by
threats. But in neither case was their cour-
age, or self-control, or strength of will in-
creased. Only when one is able to make the
bath itself attractive is that energy of will de-
veloped that gains a victory over the feeling
of fear or discomfort and produces a real ethi-
cal impression, viz., that virtue is its own re-
ward. Wherever a child is deterred from a
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144 The Century of the Child
bad habit or fault by corporal punishment, a
real ethical result is not reached. The child
has only learnt to fear an unpleasant conse-
quence, which lacks real connection with the
thing itself, a consequence it well knows could
have been absent. Such fear is as far removed
as heaven from the conviction that the good is
better than the bad. The child soon becomes
convinced that the disagreeable accompani-
ment is no necessary result of the action, that
by greater cleverness the punishment might
have been avoided. Thus the physical pim-
ishment increases deception not morality. In
the history of himaanity the effect of the teach-
ing about hell and fear of hell illustrates the
sort of morality produced in children's souls
by corporal punishment, that inferno of child-
hood. Only with the greatest trouble, slowly
and unconsciously, is the conviction of the su-
periority of the good established. The good
comes to be seen as more productive of happi-
ness to the individual himself and his environ-
ment. So the child learns to love the good.
By teaching the child that punishment is a
consequence drawn upon oneself he learns to
avoid the cause of punishment.
Despite all the new talk of individuality the
greatest mistake in training children is still
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Education 145
that of treating the " child " as an abstract
conception, as an inorganic or personal ma-
terial to be formed and transformed by the
hands of those who are educating him. He
is beaten, and it is thought that the whole ef-
fect of the blow stops at the moment when the
child is prevented from being bad. He has,
it is thought, a powerful reminder against fu-
ture bad behaviour. People no not suspect
that this violent interference in the physical
and psychical life of the child may have lifelong
effects. As far back as forty years ago, a
writer showed that corporal punishment had
the most powerful somatic stimulative effects.
The flagellation of the Middle Ages is known
to have had such results; and if I could publish
what I have heard from adults as to the effect
of corporal punishment on them, or what I
have observed in children, this alone would be
decisive in doing away with such punishment
in its crudest form. It very deeply influences
the personal modesty of the child. This should
be preserved above everything as the main
factor in the development of the feeling of
purity. The father who punishes his daugh-
ter in this way deserves to see her some day
a " fallen woman/' He injures her instinc-
tive feeling of the sanctity of her body, an in-
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146 The Century of the Child
stinct which even in the case of a small child
can be passionately profound. ^ Only when
every infringement of sanctity (forcible ca-
ressing is as bad as a blow) evokes an ener-
getic, instinctive repulsion, is the nature of the
child proud and pure. Children who strike
back when they are punished have the most
promising characters of all.
Numerous are the cases in which bodily
punishment can occasion irremediable damage,
not suspected by the person who administers
it, though he may triumphantly declare how
the pmiishment in the specific case has helped.
Most adults feel free to tell how a whipping
has injured them in one way or another, but
when they take up the training of their own
children they depend on the eflPect of such
chastisement.
What burning bitterness and desire for
vengeance, what canine fawning flattery, does
not corporal punishment call forth. It makes
the lazy lazier, the obstinate more obstinate,
the hard, harder. It strengthens those two
emotions, the root of almost all evil in the
world, hatred and fear. And as long as blows
are made synonymous with education, both of
these emotions will keep their mastery over
men.
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Education 147
One of the most frequent occasions for re-
course to this punishment is obstinacy, but
what is called obstinacy is only fear or in-
capacity. The child repeats a false answer,
is threatened with blows, and again repeats it
just because he is afraid not to say the right
thing. He is struck and then answers rightly.
This is a triumph of education; refractoriness
is overcome. But what has happened? In-
creased fear has led to a strong effort of
thought, to a momentary increase of self-con-
trol. The next day the child will very likely
repeat the fault. Where there is real obstinacy
on the part of children, I know of cases when
corporal punishment has filled them with the
lust to kill, either themselves or the person
who strikes them. On the other hand I know
of others, where a mother has brought an ob-
stinate child to repentance and self-mastery
by holding him quietly and calmly on her
knees.
How many untrue confessions have been
forced by fear of blows; how much daring
passion for action, spirit of adventure, play
of fancy, and stimulus to discovery has been
repressed by this same fear. Even where
blows do not cause lying, they always hinder
absolute straightforwardness and the down-
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148 The Century of the Child
right personal courage to show oneself as one is.
As long as the word " hlow " is used at all in
a home, no perfect honour will be found in
children. So long as the home and the school
use this method of education, brutality will be
developed in the child himself at the cost of
humanity. The child uses on animals, on his
yoimg brothers and sisters, on his comrades,
the methods applied to himself. He puts in
practice the same argument, that " badness "
must be cured with blows. Only children ac-
custonied to be treated mildly, learn to see
that influence can be gained without using
force. To see this is one of man's privileges,
sacrificed by man through descending to the
methods of the brute. Only by the child see-
ing his teacher always and everywhere ab-
staining from the use of actual force, will he
come himself to despise force on all those oc-
casions which do not involve the defence of a
weaker person against physical superiority.
The foundation of the desire for war is to be
sought for less in the war games than in the
teachers' rod.
To defend corporal discipline, children's
own statements are brought in evidence, they
are reported as saying they knew they de-
served such discipline in order to be made
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Education 149
good. There is no lower example of hy-
pocrisy in human nature than this. It is true
the child may be sincere in other cases in say-
ing that he feels that through punishment he
has atoned for a fault which was weighing
upon his conscience. But this is really the
foundation of a false system of ethics, the
kind which still continues to be preached as
Christian, namely; that a fault may be atoned
for by sufferings which are not directly con-
nected with the fault. The basis of the new
morality is just the opposite as I have already
shown. It teaches that no fault can be atoned
for, that no one can escape the results of his
actions in any way.
Untruthfulness belongs to the faults which
the teacher thinks he must most frequently
pimish with blows. But there is no case in
which this method is more dangerous.
When the much-needed guide-book for par-
ents is published, the well-known story of
George Washington and the hatchet must ap-
pear in it, accompanied by the remark which
a clever ten-year-old child added to the anec-
dote: " It is no trouble telling the truth when
one has such a kind father."
I formerly divided untruthfulness into un-
willing, shameless, and imaginative lies. A
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short time ago I rkn across a much better divi-
sion of lying; first "cold" lies, that is, fully-
conscious imtruthfulness which must be
punished, and " hot " lies; the expression of an
excited temperament or of a vigorous fancy.
I agree with the author of this distinction that
the last should not be punished but corrected,
though not with a pedantic rule of thumb
measiu'e, based on how much it exceeds or falls
short of truth. It is to be cured by ridicule, a
dangerous method of education in general, but
useful when one observes that this type of un-
truthfulness threatens to develop into real un-
trustworthiness. In dealing with these faults
we are very strict towards children, so strict
that no lawyer, no politician, no journalist, no
poet, could exercise his profession if the same
standard were applied to them as to children.
The white lie is, as a French scientist has
shown, partly caused by pure morbidness,
partly through some defect in the conception.
It is due to an empty space, a dead point in
memory, or in consciousness, that produces a
defective idea or gives one no idea at all of
what has happened. In the affairs of every-
day life the adults are often mistaken as to
their intentions or acts. They may have for-
gotten about their actions, and it requires a
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Education 151
strong effort of memory to call them back into
their minds; or they suggest to themselves
that they have done, or not done, something.
In all of these cases, if they were forced to
give a distinct answer, they would lie. In
every case of this kind, where a child is con-
cerned, the lie is assumed to be a conscious
one, and when on being submitted to a strict
cross-examination, he hesitates, becomes con-,
fused, and blushes, it is looked upon as a proof
that he knows he has been telling an untruth,
although as a rule there has been no instance
of untruthfulness, except the finally extorted
confession from the child that he has lied. Yet
in all these complicated psychological prob-
lems, corporal punishment is treated as a
solution.
The child who never hears lying at home,
who does not see exaggerated weight placed
on small, merely external things, who is not
made cowardly by fear, who hears conscious
lies always spoken of with contempt, will get
out of the habit of untruthfulness simply by
psychological means. First he will find that
untruthfulness causes astonishment, and a
repetition of it, scorn and lack of confidence.
But these methods should not be applied to
untruthfulness caused by distress or by rich-
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152 The Century of the Child
ness of imagination; or to such cases as origi-
nate from the obscure mental ideas noted
above, ideas whose connection with one another
the child cannot make clear to himself. The
cold untruth on the other hand, must be pmi-
ished; first by going over it with the child,
then letting him experience its effect in lack
of confidence, which will only be restored when
the child shows decided improvement in this
regard. It is of the greatest importance to
show children full and unlimited confidence,
even though one quietly maintains an attitude
of alert watchfulness; for continuous and un-
deserved mistrust is just as demoralising as
blind and easy confidence.
No one who has been beaten for lying learns
by it to love truth. The accuracy of this
principle is illustrated by adults who despise
corporal punishment in their childhood yet
continue to tell untruths by word and deed.
Fear may keep the child from technical
untruth, but fear also produces untrustworthi-
ness. Those who have been beaten in child-
hood for lying have often suffered a serious
injury immeasurably greater than the direct
lie. The truest men I ever knew lie voluntar-
ily and involuntarily; while others who might
never be caught in a lie are thoroughly false.
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Education 153
This corruption of personality begins fre-
quently at the tenderest age under the
influence of early training. Children are
given untrue motives, half -true information;
are threatened, admonished. The child's will,
thought, and feeling are oppressed; against
this treatment dishonesty is the readiest method
of defence. In this way educators who make
truth their highest aim, make children un-
truthful. I watched a child who was severely
punished for denying something he had un-
consciously done, and noted how under the
influence of this senseless punishment he de-
veloped extreme dissimulation.
Truthfulness requires above everything un-
broken determination; and many nervous little
liars need nourishing food and life in the open
air, not blows. A great artist, one of the few
who live wholly according to the modem prin-
ciples of life, said to me on one occasion: " My
son does not know what a lie is, nor what a
blow is. His step-brother, on the other hand,
lied when he came into our house; but lying
did not work in the atmosphere of calm and
freedom. After a year the habit disappeared
by itself, only because it always met with deep
astonishment."
This makes me, in passing, note one of the
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154 The Century of the Child
other many mistakes of education, viz., the
infinite trouble taken in trying to do away with
a fault which disappears by itself. People
take infinite pains to teach small children to
speak distinctly who, if left to themselves,
would leam it by themselves, provided they
were always spoken to distinctly. This same
principle holds good of numerous other things,
in children's attitude and behaviour, that can
be left simply to a good example and to time.
One's infiuence should be used in impressing
upon the child habits for which a foundation
must be laid at the very beginning of his
life.
There is another still more unfortunate mis-
take, the mistake of correcting and judging
by an external effect produced by the act, by
the scandal it occasions in the environment.
Children are struck for using oaths and im-
proper words the meaning of which they do not
understand; or if they do understand, the re-
sult of strictness is only that they go on keep-
ing silence in matters in which sincerity
towards those who are bringing them up is of
the highest importance. The very thing the
child is allowed to do uncorrected at home, is
not seldom corrected if it happens away from
home. iSo the child gets a false idea that it
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Education 155
is not the thing that deserves punishment, but
its publicity. When a mother is ashamed of
the bad behaviour of her son she is apt to strike
him — ^instead of striking her own breast!
When an adventurous feat fails he is beaten,
but he is praised when successful. These prac-
tices produce demoralisation. Once in a
wood I saw two parents laughing while the
ice held on which their son was sliding; when
it broke suddenly they threatened to whip him.
It required strong self-control in order not to
say to this pair that it was not the son who
deserved punishment but themselves.
On occasions like these, parents avenge
their own fright on their children. I saw a
child become a coward because an anxious
mother struck him every time he fell down,
while the natural result inflicted on the child
would have been more than sufiicient to in-
crease his carefulness. When misfortime is
caused by disobedience, natural alarm is, as a
rule, enough to prevent a repetition of it. If
it is not sufiicient blows have no restraining
effect; they only embitter. The boy finds that
adults have forgotten their own period of
childhood; he withdraws himself secretly from
this abuse of power, provided strict treat-
ment does not succeed in totally depressing
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the level of the child's will and obstructing his
energies.
This is certainly a danger, but the most seri-
ous effect of corporal punishment is that it
has estabhshed an unethical moraUty as its
result. Until the human being has learnt to
see that effort, striving, development of
power, are their own reward, life remains an
unbeautiful affair. The debasing effects of
vanity and ambition, the small and great
cruelties produced by injustice, are all due to
the idea that failure or success sets the value
to deeds and actions.
A complete revolution in this crude theory
of value must come about before the earth can
become the scene of a happy but considerate
development of power on the part of free and
fine human beings. Every contest decided
by examinations and prizes is ultimately an
immoral method of training. It awakens
only evil passions, envy and the impression of
injustice on the one side, arrogance on the
other. After I had during the course of
twenty years fought these school examina-
tions, I read with thorough agreement a short
time ago, Ruskin's views on the subject. He
believed that all competition was a false basis
of stimulus, and every distribution of prizes
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Education 157
a false means. He thought that the real sign
of talent in a boy, auspicious for his future
career, was his desire to work for work's sake.
He declared that the real aim of instruction
should be to show him his own proper and
special gifts, to strengthen them in him, not
to spur him on to an empty competition
with those who were plainly his superiors in
capacity.
Moreover it ought not to be forgotten that
success and failure involve of themselves their
own punishment and their own reward, the
one bitter, the other sweet enough to secure
in a natural way increased strength, care,
prudence, and endurance. It is completely
unnecessary for the educator to use, besides
these, some special punishments or special re-
wards, and so pervert the conceptions of
the child that failure seems to him to be a
wrong, success on the other hand as the
right.
No matter where one turns one's gaze, it is
notorious that the externally encouraging or
awe-inspiring means of education, are an ob-
stacle to what are the chief human character-
istics, courage in oneself and goodness to
others.
A people whose education is carried on by
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158 The Century of the Child
gentle means only (I mean the people of
Japan), have shown that manlmess is not in
danger where children are not hardened by
corporal pmiishment. These gentle means
are just as effective in calling forth self-mast-
ery and consideration. These virtues are so
imprinted on children, at the tenderest age,
that one learns first in Japan what attraction
considerate kindliness bestows upon life. In
a country where blows are never seen, the first
rule of social intercourse is not to cause dis-
comfort to others. It is told that when a
foreigner in Japan took up a stone to throw
it at a dog, the dog did not run. No one had
ever thrown a stone at him. Tenderness to-
wards animals is the complement in that coun-
try of tenderness in human relationship, a
tenderness whose result is observed, among
other effects, in a relatively small number of
crimes against life and security.
War, hunting for pleasure, corporal disci-
pline, are nothing more than different expres-
sions of the tiger nature still alive in man.
When the rod is thrown away, and when, as
some one has said, children are no longer boxed
on their ears but are given magnifying glasses
and photographic cameras to increase their
capacity for life and for loving it, instead of
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Education 159
learning to destroy it, real education in hu-
manity will begin.
For the benefit of those who are not con-
vinced that corporal punishment can be dis-
pensed with in a manly education, by so remote
and so distant an example as Japan, I should
like to mention a fact closer to us. Our Ger-
manic forefathers did not have this method of
education. It was introduced with Christianity.
Corporal discipline was turned into a religious
duty, and as late as the seventeenth century
there were intelligent men who flogged their
children once a week as a part of spiritual
guardianship. I once asked our great poet,
Victor Rydberg, and he said that he had found
no proof that corporal punishment was usual
among the Germans in heathen times. I
asked him whether he did not believe that the
fact of its absence had encouraged the ener-
getic individualism and manliness in the North-
ern peoples. He thought so, and agreed with
me. Finally, I might note from our own
time, that there are many families and schools,
our girls' schools for example, and also boys*
schools in some countries, where corporal pim-
ishment is never used. I know a family with
twelve children whose activity and capacity
are not damaged by bringing them imder the
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rule of duty alone. Corporal punishment is
never used in this home; a determined but mild
mother has taught the children to obey volun-
tarily, and has known how to train their wills
to self-control.
By " voluntary obedience/' I do not mean
that the child is bound to ask endless questions
for reasons, and to dispute them before he
obeys. A good teacher never gives a com-
mand without there being some good reason,
but whether the child is convinced or not, he
must always obey, and if he asks " why '* the
answer is very simple; every one, adults as
well as children, must obey the right and must
submit to what cannot be avoided. The great
necessity in life must be imprinted in child-
hood. This can be done without harsh means
by training the child, even previous to his
birth, by cultivating one's self-control, and
after his birth by never giving in to a child's
caprices.
The rule is, in a few cases, to work in op-
position to the action of the child, but in other
cases work constructively; I mean provide the
child with material to construct his own per-
sonality and then let him do this work of
construction. This is, in brief, the art of
education. The worst of all educational
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methods are threats. The only effective ad-
monitions are short and infrequent ones. The
greatest skill in the educator is to be silent
for the moment and then so reprove the fault,
indirectly, that the child is brought to correct
himself or make himself the object of blame.
This can be done by the instructor telling
something that causes the child to compare his
own conduct with the hateful or admirable
types of behaviour about which he hears in-
formation. Or the educator may give an
opinion which the child must take to himself
although it is not applied directly to him.
On many occasions a forceful display of in-
dignation on the part of the elder person is
an excellent punishment, if the indignation is
reserved for the right moment. I know
children to whom nothing was more frightful
than their father's scorn; this was dreaded.
Children who are deluged with directions and
religious devotions, who receive an ounce of
morality in every cup of joy, are most certain
to be those who will revolt against all this.
Nearly every thinking person feels that the
deepest educational influences in his life have
been indirect; some good advice not given to
him directly; a noble deed told without any
direct reference. But when people come them-
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i62 The Century of the Child
selves to train others they forget all their own
personal experience.
The strongest constructive factor in the
education of a human being is the settled, quiet
order of home, its peace, and its duty. Open-
heartedness, industry, straightforwardness at
home develop goodness, desire to work, and
simplicity in the child. Examples of artistic
work and books in the home, its customary life
on ordinary days and holidays, its occupa-
tions and its pleasures, should give to the emo*
tions and imagination of the child, periods of
movement and repose, a sure contour and a
rich colom*. The pure, warm, clear atmos-
phere in which father, mother, and children
live together in freedom and confidence; where
none are kept isolated from the interests of the
others; but each possesses full freedom for his
own personal interest; where none trenches on
the rights of others; where all are willing to
help one another when necessary, — ^in this at-
mosphere egoism, as well as altruism, can
attain their richest development, and individu-
ality find its just freedom. As the evolution
of man's soul advances to imdreamed-of pos-
sibilities of refinement, of capacity, of pro-
fundity; as the spiritual life of the generation
becomes more manifold in its combinations
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Education 163
and in its distinctions; the more time one has
for observing the wonderful and deep secrets
of existence, behind the visible, tangible, world
of sense, the more will each new generation of
children show a more refined and a more con-
sistent mental life. It is impossible to attain
this result under the torture of the crude
methods in our present home and school train-
ing. We need new homes, new schools, new
marriages, new social relations, for those new
souls who are to feel, love, and suffer, in ways
infinitely numerous that we now can not
even name. Thus they will come to un-
derstand life; they will have aspirations and
hopes; they will believe; they will pray. The
conceptions of religion, love, and art, all these
must be revolutionised so radically, that one
now can only surmise what new forms will be
created in future generations. This trans-
formation can be helped by the training of the
present, by casting aside the withered foliage
which now covers the budding possibilities of
life.
The house must once more become a home
for the souls of children, not for their bodies
alone. For such homes to be formed, that in
their turn will mould children, the children
must be given back to the home. Instead of the
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164 The Century of the Child
study preparation at home for the school tak-
ing up, as it now does, the best part of a child's
life, the school must get the smaller part, the
home the larger part. The home will have the
responsibility of so using the free time as well
on ordinary days as on holidays, that the child-
ren will really become a part of the home both
in their work and in their pleasures. The
children will be taken from the school, the
street, the factory, and restored to the home.
The mother will be given back from work
outside, or from social life to the children.
Thus natural training in the spirit of Rous-
seau and Spencer will be realised; a training
for Ufe, by life at home.
Such was the training of Old Scandanavia;
the direct share of the child in the work of the
adult, in real labours and dangers, gave to the
life of our Scandanavian forefathers (with
whom the boy began to be a man at twelve
years of age), unity, character, and strength.
Things specially made for children, the anxi-
ous watching over all their undertakings, sup-
port given to all their steps, courses of work
and pleasure specially prepared for children,
— these are the fimdamental defects of our
present day education. An eighteen-year-
old girl said to me a short time ago, that she
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Education 165
and other girls of the same age were so tired
of the system of vigilance, protection, amuse-
ment, and pampering at school and at home,
that they were determined to bring up their
own children in hunger, corporal discipline,
and drudgery.
One can understand this unfortunate re-
action against an artificial environment; the
environment in which children and young peo-
ple of the present grow up; an existence that
evokes a passionate desire for the realities of
life, for individual action at one's own risk and
responsibility, instead of being, as is now the
case, at home and in the school, the object of
another's care.
What is required, above all, for the children
of the present day, is to be assigned again real
home occupations, tasks they must do consci-
entiously, habits of work arranged for week
days and holidays without oversight, in every
case where the child can help himself. In-
stead of the modern school child having a
mother and servants about him to get him
ready for school and to help him to remember
things, he should have time every day be-
fore school to arrange his room and brush his
clothes, and there should be no effort to make
him remember what is connected with the
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school. The home and the school should com-
hine together systematically to let the child
suflFer for the results of his own negligence.
Just the reverse of this system rules to-day.
Mothers learn their children's lessons, invent
plays for them, read their story hooks to them,
arrange their rooms after them, pick up what
they have let fall, put in order the things they
have left in confusion, and in this and in other
ways, by protective pampering and attention,
their desire for work, their endurance, the gifts
of invention and imagination, qualities proper
to the child, become weak and passive. The
home now is only a preparation for school. In
it, young people growing up, are accustomed
to receive services, without performing any on
their part. They are trained to be always re-
ceptive instead of giving something in return.
Then people are surprised at a youthful gen-
eration, selfish and imrestrained, pressing
forward shamelessly on all occasions before
their elders, crudely xmresponsive in respect of
those attentions, which in earlier generations
were a beautiful custom among the young.
To restore this custom, all the means usu-
ally adopted now to protect the child from
physical and psychical dangers and incon-
veniences, will have to be removed. Throw
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Education 167
the thermometer out of the window and begin
with a sensible course of toughening; teach the
child to know and to bear natural pain.
Corporal punishment must be done away with
not because it is painful but because it is pro-
foundly immoral and hopelessly unsuitable.
Repress the egoistic demands of the child when
he interferes with the work or rest of others;
never let him either by caresses or by nagging
usurp the rights of grown people; take care
that the servants do not work against what
the parents are trying to insist on in this and
in other matters.
We must begin in doing for the child in
certain ways a thousand times more and in
others a hundred thousand times less. A be-
ginning must be made in the tenderest age
to establish the child's feeling for nature. Let
him live year in and year out in the same coun-
try home; this is one of the most significani;
and profound factors in training. It can be
held to even where it is now neglected. The
same thing holds good of making a choice
library, commencing with the first years of
life; so that the child will have, at diflferent
periods of his life, suitable books for each age;
not as is now often the case, get quite spoilt
by the constant change of summer excursions,.
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by worthless children's books, and costly
toys. They should never have any but the
simplest books; the so-called classical ones.
They should be amply provided with means of
preparing their own playthings. The worst
feature of our system are the playthings
which imitate the luxury of grown people.
By such objects the covetous impulse of the
child for acquisition is increased, his own ca-
pacity for discovery and imagination limited,
or rather, it would be limited if children with
the sound instinct of preservation, did not
happily smash the perfect playthings, which
give them no creative opportunity, and them-
selves make new playthings from fir cones,
acorns, thorns, and fragments of pottery, and
all other sorts of rubbish which can be trans-
formed into objects of great price by the power
of the imagination.
To play with children in the right way is
also a great art. It should never be done if
children do not themselves know what they are
going to do; it should always be a special treat
for them as well as their elders. But the
adults must always on such occasions, leave
behind every kind of educational idea and go
completely into the child's world of thought
and imagination. No attempt should be
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Education 169
made to teach them at these times anything
else but the old satisfactory games. The ex-
periences derived from these games about the
nature of the children, who are stimulated in
one direction or another by the game, must be
kept for later use.
Games in this way increase confidence be-
tween children and adults. They learn to
know their elders better. But to allow child-
ren to turn all the rooms into places to play
in, and to demand constantly that their elders
shall interest themselves in them, is one of the
most dangerous species of pampering common
to the present day. The children become ac-
customed to selfishness and mental depend-
ence. Besides this constant educational effort
brings with it the dulling of the child's per-
sonality. If children were free in their own
world, the nursery, but out of it had to sub-
mit to the strict limits imposed by the habits,
wills, work, and repose of parents, their re-
quirements and their wishes, they would de-
velop into a stronger and more considerate
race than the youth of the present day. It
is not so much talking about being considerate,
but the necessity of considering others, of
really helping oneself and others, that has an
educational value. In earlier days, children
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were quiet as mice in the presence of elder per-
sons. Instead of, as they do now, breaking
into a guest's conversation, they learned to
listen. If the conversation of adults is varied,
this can be called one of the best educational
methods for children. The ordinary life of
children, imder the old system, was lived in
the nursery where they received their most im-
portant training from an old faithful servant
and from one another. From their parents
they received corporal punishment, sometimes
a caress. In comparison with this system, the
present way of parents and children living
together would be absolute progress, if par-
ents could but abstain from explaining, ad-
vising, improving, influencing every thought
and every expression. But all spiritual, men-
tal, and bodily protective rules make the child
now indirectly selfish, because everything
centres about him and therefore he is kept in
a constant state of irritation. The six-year-
old can disturb the conversation of the adult,
but the twelve-year-old is sent to bed about
eight o'clock, even when he, with wide open
eyes, longs for a conversation that might be
to him an inspiring stimulus for life.
Certainly some simple habits so far as con-
duct and order, nourishment and sleep, air and
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Education 171
water, clothing and bodily movement, are con-
cerned, can be made the fomidations for the
child's conceptions of morality. He cannot be
made to learn soon enough that bodily health
and beauty must be regarded as high ethical
characteristics, and that what is injurious to
health and beauty must be regarded as a hate-
ful act. In this sphere, children must be kept
entirely independent of custom by allowing
the exception to every rule to have its vaKd
place. The present anxious solicitude that
children should eat when the clock strikes, that
they get certain food at fixed meals, that they
be clothed according to the degree of tempera-
ture, that they go to bed when the clock
strikes, that they be protected from every drop
of unboiled water and every extra piece of
candy, this makes them nervous, irritable
slaves of habit. A reasonable toughening
process against the inequalities, discomforts,
and chances of life, constitutes one of the most
important bases of joy of living and of
strength of temper. In this case too, the be-
haviour of the person who gives the training,
is the best means of teaching children to smile
at small contretemps, things which would
throw a cloud over the sun, if one got into the
habit of treating them as if they were of great
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importance. If the child sees the parent do-
ing readily an unpleasant duty, which he hon-
estly recognises as unpleasant; if he sees a
parent endure trouble or an unexpected diflS-
culty easily, he will be in honour bound to do
the like. Just as children without many words
learn to practice good deeds when they see
good deeds practised about them; learn to en-
joy the beauty of nature and art when they
see that adults enjoy them, so by living more
beautifully, more nobly, more moderately, we
speak best to children. They are just as
receptive to impressions of this kind as they
are careless of those made by force.
Since this is my alpha and omega in the art
of education, I repeat now what I said at the
beginning of this book and half way through
it. Try to leave the child in peace; interfere
directly as seldom as possible; keep away all
crude and impure impressions; but give all
your care and energy to see that personality,
life itself, reality in its simplicity and in its
nakedness, shall all be means of training the
child.
Make demands on the powers of children
and on their capacity for self-control, propor-
tionate to the special stage of their develop-
ment, neither greater nor lesser demands than
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Education 173
on adults. But respect the joys of the child,
his tastes, work, and time, just as you would
those of an adult. Education will thus be-
come an infinitely simple and infinitely harder
art, than the education of the present day, with
its artificialised existence, its double entry
morality, one morality for the child, and one
for the adult, often strict for the child and lax
for the adult and vice versa. By treating the
child every moment as one does an adult
human being we free education from that
brutal arbitrariness, from those over-indul-
gent protective rules, which have transformed
him. Whether parents act as if children existed
for their benefit alone, or whether the parents
give up their whole lives to their children, the
result is alike deplorable. As a rule both
classes know equally little of the feelings and
needs of their children. The one class are
happy when the children are like themselves,
and their highest ambition is to produce in their
children a successful copy of their own
thoughts, opinions, and ideals. Really it
ought to pain them very much to see them-
selves so exactly copied. What life expected
from them and required from them was just
the opposite — a richer combination, a better
creation, a new type, not a reproduction of
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that which is already exhausted. The other
class strive to model their childen not
according to themselves hut according to their
ideal of goodness. They show their love by
their willingness to extinguish their own per-
sonalities for their children's sake. This they
do by letting the children feel that everything
which concerns them stands in the foreground.
This should be so, but only indirectly.
The concerns of the whole scheme of life,
the ordering of the home, its habits, intercourse,
purposes, care for the needs of children, and
their soimd development, must stand in the
foreground. But at present, in most cases,
children of tender years, as well as those who
are older, are sacrificed to the chaotic con-
dition of the home. They learn self-will with-
out possessing real freedom; they live imder a
discipline which is spasmodic in its application.
When one daughter after another leaves
home in order to make herself independent they
are often driven to do it by want of freedom,
or by the lack of character in family life. In
both directions the girl sees herself forced to
become something different, to hold different
opinions, to think different thoughts, to act
contrary to the dictates of her own being. A
mother happy in the friendship of her own
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Education 175
daughter, said not long ago that she desired
to erect an asylum for tormented daughters.
Such an asylum would be as necessary as a
protection against pampering parents as
against those who are overbearing. Both
alike, torture their children though in different
ways, by not understanding the child's right
to have his own point of view, his own ideal of
happiness, his own proper tastes and occupa-
tion. They do not see that children exist as
little for their parent's sake as parents do for
their children's sake. Family life would have
an intelligent character if each one lived fully
and entirely his own life and allowed the others
to do the same. None should tyrannise over,
nor should suffer tyranny from, the other.
Parents who give their home this character can
justly demand that children shall accommodate
themselves to the habits of the household as
long as they live in it. Children on their part
can ask that their own life of thought and feel-
ing shall be left in peace at home, or that they
be treated with the same consideration that
would be given to a stranger. When the par-
ents do not meet these conditions they them-
selves are the greater sufferers. It is very
easy to keep one's son from expressing his raw
views, very easy to tear a daughter away from
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176 The Century of the Child
her book and to bring her to a tea-party
by giving her unnecessary occupations; very
easy by a scornful word to repress some pow-
erful emotion, A thousand similar things oc-
cur every day in good f amiUes through the
whole world. But whenever we hear of young
people speaking of their intellectual homeless-
ness and sadness, we begin to understand why
father and mother remain behind in homes*
from which the daughters have hastened to
depart; why children take their cares, joys,
and thoughts to strangers; why, in a word, the
old and the young generation are as mutually
dependent as the roots and flowers of plants,
so often separate with mutual repulsion.
This is as true of highly cultivated fathers
and mothers as of simple bourgeois or peasant
parents. Perhaps, indeed, it may be truer of
the first class; the latter torment their children
in a naive way, while the former are infinitely
wise and methodical in their stupidity. Rarely
is a mother of the upper class one of those
artists of home Hf e who through the blitheness,
the goodness, and joyousness of her character,
makes the rhythm of everyday life a dance, and
hoUdays into festivals. Such artists are often
simple women who have passed no examina-
tions, founded no clubs, and written no books.
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Education 177
The highly cultivated mothers and the socially
useful mothers on the other hand are not sel-
dom those who call forth criticism from their
sons. It seems almost an invariable rule that
mothers should make mistakes when they wish
to act for the welfare of their sons. " How
infinitely valuable," say their children, " would
I have f oimd a mother who could have kept
quiet, who would have been patient with me,
who would have given me rest, keeping the
outer world at a distance from me, with
kindly soothing hands. Oh, would that I had
had a mother on whose breast I could have
laid my head, to be quiet and dream/'
A distinguished woman writer is surprised
that all of her well-thought-out plans for her
children fail — ^those children in whom she saw
the material for her passion for governing, the
clay that she desired to mould.
The writer just cited says very justly that
maternal unselfishness alone can perform the
task of protecting a young being with wisdom
and kindliness, by allowing him to grow ac-
cording to his own laws. The unselfish
mother, she says, will joyfully give the best of
her life energy, powers of soul and spirit to
a growing being and then open all doors to
him, leaving him in the broad world to follow
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his own paths, and ask for nothing, neither
thanks, nor praise, nor remembrance. But
to most mothers may be applied the bit-
ter exclamation of a son in the book just men-
tioned, "even a mother must know how she
tortures another; if she has not this capacity by
nature, why in the world should I recognise
her as my mother at all."
Certain mothers spend the whole day in
keeping their children's nervous system in a
state of irritation. They make work hard and
play joyless, whenever they take a part in it.
At the present time, too, the school gets control
of the child, the home loses all the means by
which formerly it moulded the child's soul life
and ennobled family life. The school, not
father and mother, teaches children to play,
the school gives them manual training, the
school teaches them to sing, to look at pictures,
to read aloud, to wander about out of doors;
schools, clubs, sport and other pleasures ac-
custom youth in the cities more and more to
outside Kfe, and a daily recreation that kills
the true feeling for holiday. Young people,
often, have no other impression of home than
that it is a place where they meet society which
bores them.
Parents surrender their children to schools
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Education 179
in those years in which they should influence
their minds. When the school gives them
back they do not know how to make a fresh
start with the children, for they themselves
have ceased to be young.
But getting old is no necessity; it is only a
bad habit. It is very interesting to observe a
face that is getting old. What time makes
out of a face shows better than anything else
what the man has made out of time. Most
men in the early period of middle age are
neither intellectually fat nor lean, they are
hardened or dried up. Naturally young peo-
ple look upon them with unsympathetic eyes,
for they feel that there is such a thing as
eternal youth, which a soul can win as a prize
for its whole work of inner development. But
they look in vain for this second eternal youth
in their elders, filled with worldly nothing-
nesses and things of temporary importance.
With a sigh they exclude the " old people ''
from their future plans and they go out in
the world in order to choose their spiritual
parents.
This is tragic but just, for if there is a field
on which man must sow a hundred-fold in
order to harvest tenfold it is the souls of
children.
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When I began at five years of age to make
a rag doll, that by its weight and size really
gave the illusion of reality and bestowed much
joy on its young mother, I began to think
about the education of my fjuture children.
Then as now my educational ideal was that the
children should be happy, that they should not
fear. Fear is the misfortune of childhood, and
the sufferings of the child come from the half-
realised opposition between his imlimited pos-
sibilities of happiness and the way in which
these possibilities are actually handled. It
may be said that life, at every stage, is cruel
in its treatment of our possibilities of happi-
ness. But the difference between the suffer-
ings of the adult from existence, and the
sufferings of the child caused by adults, is
tremendous. The child is unwilling to resign
himself to the sufferings imposed upon him by
adults and the more impatient the child is
against unnecessary suffering, the better; for
so much the more certainly will he some day
be driven to find means to transform for him-
self and for others the hard necessities of life.
A poet, Rydberg, in our country who had
the deepest intuition into child's nature, and
therefore had the deepest reverence for it,
wrote as follows: "Where we behold children
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we suspect there are princes, but as to the
kings, where are they? " Not only life's tragic
elements diminish and dam up its vital
energies. Equally destructive is a parent's
want of reverence for the sources of life which
meet them in a new being. Fathers and moth-
ers must bow their heads in the dust before the
exalted nature of the child. Until they see
that the word " child " is only another expres-
sion for the conception of majesty; until they
feel that it is the future which in the form of a
child sleeps in their arms, and history which
plays at their feet, they will not understand
that they have as little power or right to pre-
scribe laws for this new being as they possess
the power or might to lay down paths for the
stars.
The mother should feel the same reverence
for the unknown worlds in the wide-open eyes
of her child, that she has for the worlds which
like white blossoms are sprinkled over the blue
orb of heaven; the father should see in his child
the king's son whom he must serve hmnbly
with his own best powers, and then the child
will come to his own; not to the right of asking
others to become the plaything of his caprices
but to the right of living his full strong per-
sonal child's life along with a father and a
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mother who themselves live a personal life, a
life from whose sources and powers the child
can take the elements he needs for his own in-
dividual growth. Parents should never ex-
pect their own highest ideals to become the
ideals of their child. The free-thinking sons of
pious parents and the Christian children of
freethinkers have become almost proverbial.
But parents can live nobly and in entire ac-
cordance to their own ideals which is the same
thing as making children idealists. This can
often lead to a quite different system of
thought from that pursued by the parent.
As to ideals, the elders should here as else-
where, offer with timidity their advice and
their experience. Yes they should try to let
the young people search for it as if they were
seeking fruit hidden under the shadow of
leaves. If their counsel is rejected, they must
show neither sm-prise nor lack of self-control.
The query of a himaourist, why he should do
anything for posterity since posterity had
done nothing for him, set me to thinking in my
early youth in the most serious way. I felt
that posterity had done much for its forefath-
ers. It had given them an infinite horizon for
the future beyond the bounds of their daily
effort. We must in the child see the new fate
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Education 183
of the human race; we must carefully treat the
fine threads in the child's soul because these
are the threads that one day will form the
woof of world events. We must realise that
every pebble by which one breaks into the
glassy depths of the child's soul will extend its
influence through centuries and centuries in
ever widening circles. Through our fathers,
without our will and without choice, we are
given a destiny which controls the deepest
foundation of our own being. Through our
posterity, which we ourselves create, we can
in a certain measure, as f riee beings, determine
the future destiny of the human race.
By a realisation of all this in an entirely new
way, by seeing the whole process in the light
of the religion of development, the twentieth
century will be the century of the child. This
will come about in two ways. Adults will
first come to an understanding of the child's
character and tHen the simplicity of the child's
character will be kept by adults. So the old
social order will be able to renew itself.
Psychological pedagogy has an exalted an-
cestry. I will not go back to those artists in
education called Socrates and Jesus, but I
commence with the modern world. In the
hours of its sunrise, in which we, who look
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back, think we see a futile Renaissance, then
as now the spring flowers came up amid
the decaying foUage. At this period there
came a demand for the remodeUing of educa-
tion through the great figure of modem
times, Montaigne, that skeptic who had so
deep a reverence for reahties. In his
Essays, in his Letters to the Countess of
Gurson, are found all of the elements for the
education of the future. About the great
German and Swiss specialists in pedagogy and
psychology, Comenius, Basedow, Pestalozzi,
Salzmann, Froebel, Herbart, I do not need
to speak. I will only mention that the great-
est men of Germany, Lessing, Herder,
Goethe, Kant and others, took the side of
natural training. In regard to England it is
well known that John Locke in his Thoughts
on Education, was a worthy predecessor of
Herbert Spencer, whose book on education in
its intellectual, moral, and physical relations,
was the most noteworthy book on education
in the last century.
It has been noted that Spencer in educa-
tional theory is indebted to Rousseau; and
that in many cases, he has only said what the
great German authorities, whom he certainly
did not know, said before him. But this does
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Education 185
not diminish Spencer's merit in the least. Ab-
solutely new thoughts are very rare. Truths
which were once new must be constantly re-
newed by being pronounced again from the
depth of the ardent personal conviction of a
new human being.
That rational thoughts on the subject
of pedagogy as on other subjects, are con-
stantly expressed and re-expressed, shows
among other things that reasonable, or prac-
tically untried education has certain principles
which are as axiomatic as those of mathema-
tics. Every reasonable thinking man must as
certainly discover anew these pedagogical
principles, as he must discover anew the rela-
tion between the angles of a triangle. Spen-
cer's book it is true has not laid again the
foundation of education. It can rather be
called the crown of the edifice founded by
Montaigne, Locke, Rousseau, and the great
German specialists in pedagogy. What is an
absolutely novel factor in our times is the
study of the psychology of the child, and the
system of education that has developed from
it.
In England, through the scientist Darwin,
this new study of the psychology of the child
was inaugurated. In Grcrmany, Preyer con-
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tributed to its extension. He has done so
partly by a comprehensive study of child-
ren's language, partly by collecting recollec-
tions of childhood on the part of the adult.
Finally he experimented directly on the child,
investigating his physical and psychical fa-
tigue and endurance, acuteness of sensation,
power, speed, and exactness in carrying out
physical and mental tasks. He has studied
his capacity of attention in emotions and in
ideas at different periods of hfe. He has
studied the speech of children, association of
ideas in children, etc. During the study of
the psychology of the child, scholars began to
substitute for this term the expression " gene-
tic psychology." For it was found that the
bio-genetic principle was valid for the develop-
ment both of the psychic and the physical hfe.
This principle means that the history of the
species is repeated in the history of the indi-
vidual; a truth substantiated in other spheres;
in philology for example. The psychology of
the child is of the same significance for gen-
eral psychology as embryology is for anatomy.
On the other hand, the description of savage
peoples, of peoples in a natural condition,
such as we find in Spencer's Descriptive So-
ciology or Weitz's Anthropology is extremely
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Education 187
instructive for a right conception of the psy-
chology of the child.
It is in this kind of psychological investiga-
tion that the greatest progress has been made
in this century. In the great publication,
Zeitschrift fur psychologic, etc., there began
in 1894 a special department for the psycho-
logy of children and the psychology of educa-
tion. In 1898, there were as many as one
hundred and six essays devoted to this sub-
ject, and they are constantly increasing.
In the chief civilised countries this investi-
gation has many distinguished pioneers, such
as Prof. Wundt, Prof. T. H. Ribot, and
others. In Germany this subject has its most
important organ in the journal mentioned
above. It numbers among its collaborators
some of the most distinguished German phy-
siologists and psychologists. As related to
the same subject must be mentioned Wundt's
Philosophischen Studien, and partly the Vier-
teljahrschrift fur Wissenschaftlichie Philoso-
phie. In France, there was founded in 1894,
the Annie Psychologique, edited by Binet and
Beaunis, and also the Bibliotheque de Pedago-
gic et de Psychologies edited by Binet. In
England there are the journals. Mind and
Brain.
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Special laboratories for experimental psy-
chology with psychological apparatus and
methods of research are f oimd in many places.
In Germany the first to be f oimded was that
of Wundt in the year 1878 at Leipzig.
France has a laboratory for experimental
psychology at Paris, in the Sorbonne, whose
director is Binet; Italy, one in Home. In
America experimental psychology is zeal-
ously pursued. As early as 1894, there were
in that country twenty-seven laboratories for
experimental psychology and four journals.
There should also be mentioned the societies
for child psychology. Recently one has been
founded in Germany; others before this time
have been at work in England and America.
A whole series of investigations carried out
in Kraepelin's laboratory in Heidelberg are
of the greatest value for determining what
the brain can do in the way of work and
impressions.
An English specialist has maintained that
the future, thanks to the modem school sys-
tem, will be able to get along without ori-
ginally creative men, because the receptive
activities of modem man will absorb the co-
operative powers of the brain to the disadvant-
age of the productive powers. And even if
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Education 189
this were not a universally valid statement but
only expressed a physiological certainty, peo-
ple will some day perhaps cease filing down
man's brain by that sandpapering process
called a school curriculum.
A champion of the transformation of peda-
gogy into a psycho-physiological science is to
be found in Sweden in the person of Prof.
Hjalmar Oehrwal who has discussed in his
essays native and foreign discoveries in the
field of psychology. One of his conclusions
is that the so-called technical exercises, gym-
nastics, manual training, sloyd, and the Uke,
are not, as they are erroneously called, a relax-
ation from mental overstrain by change in
work, but simply a new form of brain fatigue.
All work, he finds, done under conditions of
fatigue is uneconomic whether one regards the
quantity produced or its value as an exercise.
Rest should be nothing more than rest, — free-
dom to do only what one wants to, or to do
nothing at all. As to fear, he proves, follow-
ing Binet*s investigation in this subject, how
corporal discipline, threats, and ridicule lead
to cowardice; how all of these methods are to
be rejected because they are depressing and
tend to a diminution of energy. He shows,
moreover, how fear can be overcome progres-
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sively, by strengthening the nervous system
and in that way strengthening the character.
This result comes about partly when all im-
necessary terrorising is avoided, partly when
children are accustomed to bear calmly and
quietly the inevitable unpleasantnesses of
danger.
Prof. Axel Key's investigations on school
children have won international recognition.
In Sweden they have suppUed the most sig-
nificant material up to the present time for
determining the influence of studies on physi-
cal development and the results of intellectual
overstrain.
It is to be hoped that when through em-
pirical investigation we begin to get acquainted
with the real nature of children, the school and
the home will be freed from absurd notions
about the character and needs of the child,
those absurd notions which now cause painful
cases of physical and psychical maltreatment,
still called by conscientious and thinking hu-
man beings in schools and in homes, education.
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CHAPTER IV
HOMELESSNESS
Feom time to time the present age is criti-
cised, as if its corruption contrasted with the
moral strictness * of earlier periods. Such
charges are as crude and as groundless as is
most of the same kind of criticism that is com-
mon to every generation of man's history.
They have been repeated ever since man began
to strive consciously for other ends than the
momentary gratification of his undisciplined
impulses.
One need only to consult the men of the
present generation and the still living repre-
sentatives of the past generation, to be assured
that bad conduct at school is not characteristic
of our time. Let any one read the account of
life at universities in earlier periods when the
younger students were of the same age as
schoolboys in high schools and it will soon be
plain that the cause of the evil is not modem
literature nor modem belief.
The really direct causes of this difficulty
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must be looked for in human emotions. This
side of the question I do not intend to discuss
here. It can only be solved by an expert in
psychology and physiology; by one who, along
with this capacity, is a pedagogical genius.
There might not be sufficient material for such
a task, even if an individual could be found
able to put together the original elements in
the systems of Socrates, Rousseau, Spencer,
and give them life. Under no other condition
could a real contribution be made adequate to
meet the requirements of the present day in
the field of education. My intention is only
to make some remarks on the secondary cause
of the evil, for not sufficient attention has been
devoted to this side of the problem. The
cause I have in view is the increasing homeless-
ness of all branches of society. Living with
one's parents as children do who go to school
in the city is not the same as Uving at home.
Family life in the working classes is unsettled
by the mother working out of the house. In
the upper classes the same result is produced
by the constantly increasing pressure of social
pleasures and obUgations.
Formerly it was only the husband and
father whom outside interests took from the
home. Now the home is deserted by the wife
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Homelessness 193
and mother also, not alone for social gatherings
but for clubs for self -improvement, meetings,
lectures, committees; one evening after an-
other, just at the time which she should be de-
voting herself to her children who have been
occupied in the morning at school.
The ever-growing social life, the incessant
extension of club and out-of-door life, result
in the mother sending her children as early
as possible to school, even when there is no-
thing but the conditions above mentioned to
prevent her from giving the children their first
instruction herself. As a rule the present
generation of mothers who have had school
training could do this quite well, in the case
of children who do not need the social stimulus
of the school. Indeed before the school time
begins, and in the hours out of school, children
are as a rule taken by a maid servant to walk
or to skate and so on. Children of the upper
classes in most cases receive just as much, per-
haps more, of their education from the nur-
sery maid or from the school than from the
mother. The father need not be mentioned
at all, for as a rule he is an only occasional
and unessential factor in the education of the
child.
Many will say by way of objection, that at
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no time has so much been done for the educa-
tion of children as at present; that parents
were never so watchful over the physical and
psychical needs of the children; that at no time
has the intercourse between children and par-
ents been so free; at no time have schools been
so actively at work.
This is true but much of this tends to in-
crease the homelessness of which I am speak-
ing. The more the schools develop the more
they are burdened with all the instruction for
children, the more hours of the day they
require for their demands. The school is
expected to give instruction even in such
simple matters as making children acquainted
with their national Uterature, and handwork,
which mothers could do perfectly well, cer-
tainly as well as our grandmothers. The
greater the attention given at school to such
essentially good things as gymnastics, hand-
work, and games, the more children are with-
drawn from home. And even when at
home, they are hindered by lessons and writ-
ten exercises from being with their father and
mother, on those exceptional occasions when
the parents are at home. If we take into con-
sideration the way in which the modern school
system uses up the children's time, and pre-
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Homelessness 195
sent social and club life take up the time of
parents, we come to the conclusion I began
with, that domestic life is more and more on
the decline.
The reforms that must be demanded from
the schools in order to restore the children to
the home cannot be discussed now, since it is
my intention to deal here only with those mat-
ters which must be reformed by the family
itself, if reforms at school are to really benefit
the young.
Reforms of this kind have been made in
schools but mothers complain that children
have too little work at home or too few hours
at school; that they, the mothers, absolutely
do not know how they can keep the children
occupied in so much free time.
What may justly be considered the great
progress in the family life of the present day,
the confidential intercourse between parents
and children, has not taken an entirely right
direction. The result has been that children
have been permitted to behave like grown
people, sharing the habits and pleasures of
their parents, or that the parents have ceased
to live their own life. In neither of these two
ways can a deep and sound relation between
children and parents be producedt
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196 The Century of the Child
We see on the one side a minority of con-
scientious mothers and fathers, who in a real
sense live only for the children. They mould
their whole life for the life of the children; and
the children get the idea that they are the cen-
tral point of existence. On the other side, we
see children who take part in all the life and
over-refinements of the home. They demand
like adults the amusements and elegancies of
life; they even give balls and suppers at home
or in hotels for their school companions. In
these social functions, the vanity and stupidity
of adults are conscientiously imitated.
Then we require from these boys and girls,
when they reach a time of life in which the
passions awake, a self-control, a capacity of
self-denial, a stoicism towards temptations to
which they have never been trained, and which
they have never seen their parents exercise.
Most homes of the upper classes have not the
means to keep up the life that is lived in them.
By the money of creditors, or by an exorbitant
profit made at the cost of working people, or
by careless consumption of the very necessary
savings to be laid by for hard times, or against
the death of the family provider, a luxurious
style of living is maintained. But even when
in rare cases there is real ability to live in this
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Homelessness 197
way, parents would not do it, if the best in-
terests of the children were taken into account.
Elders may speak of industry as much as
they like; if the father's and mother's work for
children has no reality about it, the parents
would do best to be silent. The same must
be said of warnings and arbitrary prohibitions
to children concerning the satisfaction of their
desire for enjoyment, if the parents them-
selves do not influence the children by their
own example.
On the other hand there are just as disturb-
ing consequences when industrious parents
conceal their self-denial from their children,
when they deprive themselves in the eflfort
to spare their children the knowledge that their
parents are not in a position to clothe them
as well as their companions or to give them
the same pleasures. Least of all is home life
successful in helping children through the dif-
fictdties of their earlier years, when discipline
has killed confidence between them and their
parents, when they become insincere from want
of courage and careless from want of freedom;
when parents present themselves to the child-
ren as exceptional beings, asking for blind
reverence and absolute subjection. From such
homes in old days fine men and women could
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198 The Century of the Child
proceed, but now extremely seldom. Yoimg
I)eople recognise in oiu* days no such require-
ments; confidential intercourse with parents
has robbed them of this nimbus of inf allibihty.
Homes which send out men and women with
the strongest morality, with the freshest
stimulus to work, are those where children and
parents are companions in labour, where they
stand on the same level, where, like a good elder
sister or an elder brother, parents regard the
younger members of the household as their
equals; where parents by being children with
the children, being youthful with yoimg peo-
ple, help those who are growing up, without
the exercise of force, to develop into human
beings, always treating them as human beings.
In a home like this nothing is especially ar-
ranged for children; they are regarded not as
belonging to one kind of being while parents
represent another, but parents gain the respect
of their children by being true and natural;
they live and conduct themselves in such a
way that the children gain an insight into
their work, their efforts, and as far as possible
into their joys and pains, their mistakes and
failures. Such parents without artificial con-
descension or previous consideration gain the
sympathy of children and unconsciously edu-
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Homelessness 199
cate them in a free exchange of thought and
opinions. Here children do not receive every-
thing as a gift; according to the measure of
their power they must share in the work of the
home; they learn to take account of their par-
ents, of servants, and one another. They
have duties and rights that are just as firmly
fixed as those of their parents; and they are
respected themselves just as they are taught
to respect others. They come into daily con-
tact with realities, they can do useful tasks,
not simply pretend that they are doing them;
they can arrange their own amusements, their
own small money accounts, their own punish-
ments even, by their parents never hindering
them from suffering the natural consequences
of their own acts.
In such a home a command is never given
unless accompanied at the same time with a
reason for it, just as soon as a reason can be
imderstood. So the feeling of responsibility
is impressed upon the children from the ten-
derest age. The children are as seldom as
possible told not to do things, but such com-
mands when given are absolute because they
always rest on good reasons, not on a whim.
Mother and father are watchful, but they do
not act as spies on their children. Partial
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200 The Century of the Child
freedom teaches children to make use of com-
plete freedom, A system of negative com-
mands and oversight produces insincerity and
weakness. An old iUiterate housekeeper who
earned a Kving by taking school children to
board was one of the best educators I have
ever seen. Her method was loving young
I)eople and believing in them — a confidence
that they as a rule sought to deserve. More-
over a good home is always cheerful, its affec-
tion real, not sentimental. No time is wasted
in it in preaching about petty details or pros-
ing. Mother and sisters do not look shocked
when the small boy tells a funny story or uses
strong language. A joke is not regarded as
evidence of moral corruption, nor keen views
as an indication of depravity. Liveliness,
want of prudishness, which can be combined,
so far as the feminine part of the household is
concerned, with purity of mind and simple
nobility, are characteristics for which there can
be no substitutes. In such a household con-
cord prevails, the young and old work, read,
and talk together, together take common di-
versions; sometimes the young people, some-
times their elders, take the lead. The house
is open for the friends of the children; they
are free to enjoy themselves as completely as
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Homelessness 201
possible but in all naturalness without allow-
ing their amusements to change the habits of
the home.
It is told of the childhood of a great Fin-
nish poet, Runeberg, that his mother when she
invited the young guests of her son to dance
as long as they could, added, " When you are
thirsty, the water cooler is there, and by it
hangs the cup"; and more delightful dances,
the old lady who told the story never remem-
bered to have seen. This old-fashioned
distinction, the courage to show oneself as one
is, is absent from modern homes, and lack of
courage has resulted in lack of happiness.
The simple hospitable homely pleasures
that have now been superseded by children's
parties, lesson drudgery, and by parents living
outside of the home must come back again if
what is bad now is not to become worse. Evil
is not to be expelled by evil; it is to be over-
come by good. If the home is not to be again
sunny, quiet, simple, and lively, mothers may
go out as much as they like to discuss educa-
tion and morality in the evening. There will
be no real change. Mothers must seriously
perceive that no social activity has greater sig-
nificance than education, and that in this
nothing can replace their own appropriate
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202 The Century of the Child
influence in a home. They must make up
their minds to real reform, suph reforms as
those introduced by a lady in Stockholm; bur-
dened though she was with social engagements
and public obligations, she refused to accept
any invitation except on one day of the week,
in order to spend her evenings quietly with
her children. How long will the majority of
mothers sacrifice children to the eternal ennui
and vacuity of our modern social and club
life?
There is no intention here to recommend
that social hfe and pubhc activities shall be
deprived of the influence of experienced and
thinking mothers. But I only wish to point
to the cases of overstrain now caused by the
stress of excessive sociability and outside ac-
tivity. This kind of over-exertion, more es-
pecially, injures the home through the mother.
In our day as in all other periods, be our opin-
ions in other respects what they may, pagan.
Christian, Jewish, or free thinking, a good
home is only created by those parents who
have a religious reverence for the holiness of
the home.
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CHAPTER V
SOUL MUBDEE IN THE SCHOOLS
Any one who would attempt the task of
felling a virgin forest with a penknife would
probably feel the same paralysis of despair
that the reformer feels when confronted with
existing school systems. The latter finds an
impassable thicket of folly, prejudice, and mis-
takes, where each point is open to attack, but
where each attack fails because of the inade-
quate means at the reformer's command.
The modem school has succeeded in doing
something which, according to the law of
physics, is impossible: the annihilation of once
existent matter. The desire for knowledge,
the capacity for acting by oneself, the gift of
observation, all qualities children bring with
them to school, have, as a rule, at the close of
the school period disappeared. They have not
been transformed into actual knowledge or
interests. This is the result of children
spending almost the whole of their life from
the sixth to the eighteenth year at the school
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204 The Century of the Child
desk, hour by hour, month by month, term by
term; taking doses of knowledge, first in tea-
spoonfuls, then in dessert-spoonfuls, and
finally in tablespoonfuls, absorbing mixtures
which the teacher often has compounded from
fourth- or fifth-hand recipes.
After the school, there often comes a further
period of study in which the only distinction
in method is, that the mixture is administered
by the ladlef ul.
When young people have escaped from this
regime, their mental appetite and mental di-
gestion are so destroyed that they for ever lack
capacity for taking real nourishment. Some,
indeed, save themselves from all these un-
realities by getting in contact with realities;
they throw their books in the corner and de-
vote themselves to some sphere of practical life.
In both cases the student years are practically
squandered. Those who go further acquire
knowledge ordinarily at the cost of their per-
sonality, at the price of such qualities as
assimilation, reflection, observation, and im-
agination. If any one succeeds in escaping
these results, it happens generally with a loss
of thoroughness in knowledge. A lower grade
of intelligence, a lower capacity for work, or
a lower degree of assimilation, than that be-
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Soul Murder in the Schools 205
stowed upon the scholar by nature, is ordinarily
the result of ten or twelve school years. There
is much common-sense in the French humour-
ist's remark. " You say that you have never
gone to school and yet you are such an idiot."
The cases in which school studies are not in-
jurious, but partially useful, are those where
no regular school period has been passed
through. In place of this there was a long
period of rest, or times of private instruction,
or absolutely no instruction at all, simply study
by oneself. Nearly every eminent woman in
the last fifty years has had such self -instruc-
tion, or was an irregularly instructed girl.
Knowledge so acquired, therefore, has many
serious gaps, but it has much more freshness
and breadth. One can study with far greater
scope and apply what one studies.
Yet it is still true to-day that, however
vehemently families complain about schools,
they do not see that their demands in general
education must change, before a reasonable
school system, a school system in all respects
diflferent from the prevailing one, can come
into existence. The private schools, few in
number, that diflfer to a certain extent from the
ordinary system are swallows that are very
far from making a summer. Rather they have
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2o6 The Century of the Child
met the fate of birds who have come too early
on the scene.
As long as schools represent an idea, stand
for an abstract conception, Uke the family and
the state, so long will they, just as the family
and the state, oppress the individuals who be-
long to them. The school no more than the
family and the state represents a higher idea
or something greater than just the number of
individuals out of which it is formed. It, like
the family and the state, has no other duty,
right, or purpose than to give to each separate
individual as much development and happi-
ness as possible. To recognise these principles
is to introduce reason into the school question.
The school should be nothing but the mental
dining-room in which parents and teachers
prepare intellectual bills-of-fare suitable for
every child. The school must have the right
to determine what it can place on its bill-of-
fare, but the parents have the right to choose,
from the mental nourishment supplied by
it, the food adapted to their children. The
phantom of general culture must be driven
from school curricula and parents' brains;
the training of the individual must be a reahty
substituted in its place; otherwise reform plans
will be drawn up in vain,
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Soul Murder in the Schools 207
But just as certain simple chemical ele-
ments are contained in all nourishment, there
are certain simple elements of knowledge that
make up the foundation of all higher forms of
learning. Reading and writing one's own
language, the elements of munbers, geography,
natural science, and history, must be required
by the schools, as the obligatory basis for ad-
vanced independent study.
The elementary school beginning with the
age of nine to ten years, I regard as the real
general school. The system of instruction
must assume that the children have breadth,
repose, comprehensiveness, and capacity for
individual action. All these qualities are de-
stroyed by the present "hare and hound"
system and by its endless abstractions. Such
are the results of course readings, multiplicity
of subjects, and formalism, all defects that
have passed from the boys' schools into the
girls' schools, from the elementary schools into
the people's schools. They too are burdened
by all these faults, which, though deplored by
most people, can only be cured by radical
reform.
The instruction must be arranged in groups,
certain subjects placed among the earlier
stages of study while others are put aside for
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a later period. And in this connection it is
not sufficient to consider the psychological de-
velopment of the child. Certain subjects
must be assigned to certain times of the year.
The courses in these schools must come to
an end at about the age of fifteen or sixteen.
From them our young people can pass either
into practical life, or go on to schools of con-
tinuation and application. It would be de-
sirable to adopt the plan recommended by
Grundtvig, that one or more vacation years
should follow, before studies are taken up
again. Girls, especially, would then come
back to their studies with strengthened bodily
powers and an increased desire for knowledge.
It is now a common experience that the desire
to learn, even in the case of talented young
people, becomes quiescent, if they go on con-
tinuously with their studies, as they often do,
from the sixth to the twentieth year and
longer.
To mark out the courses of such a school
would oflfer tremendous difficulties. But these
difficulties will not be found insuperable, after
people have agreed that the souls of child-
ren require more consideration than a school
programme.
Among objections coming from parentSj^
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Sout Murder in the Schools 209
may be heard the following: That while the
state refuses to take initiative in school reform,
no one would dare to embark on a road which
makes the future of their children so uncertain.
In the meantime children must be allowed to
learn what all others learn. When the state
has taken the first step, the parents would be
willing they say to follow with remarkable
eagerness.
What, I ask, has been always the right way
to carry out reforms? There must be first an
active revolt against existing evils. This par-
ticular revolt is yet not sufficiently supported,
especially on the part of parents. The
children themselves have begun to feel the need
of protest, and, if not earlier, I hope that when
the present generation of school children be-
come fathers, mothers, and teachers, a reform
will come about.
No one can exi)ect a system to be changed,
until those who disapprove of it show that they
are in earnest, show that they are taking upon
themselves the sacrifices necessary to protect
themselves from the imhappy results of the
system. Families complain of the excessive
aggregation of subjects, and yet they con-
stantly burden the school with new subjects,
even when these subjects are things the fam-
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ily can undertake itself. While families
complain of overstrain, but make no use of the
elective system in schools, where it has been
introduced, while parents are willing to risk
nothing to realise their principles, we cannot
wonder that the state does not embark on re-
forms of any kind.
There is an old pedagogical maxim, " Man
learns for life not for school." While, for a
great part of their time, the sexes are separated
from one another, boys studying by themselves
and the girls by themselves, the training for
their future life is a bad one — a life in which
the common work and co-operation between
man and woman is, according to nature's or-
dinance, the normal thing. So long as the
general school is a school for a special class,
and not for everybody, it is no general school
in the high sense of the word, and besides no
school in which people learn for life.
I have therefore always warmly held that
the school should be no boys*, no girls' school,
no elementary and no people's school, but
should be a real general or public school as in
America, where both sexes, the children of all
grades of society, will learn that mutual con-
fidence, respect, understanding, by which their
efficient co-operation in the family and state
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Soul Murder in the Schools 211
may be made possible. The common school,
so arranged, is perhaps the most important
means to solve definitely the problem of mor-
ality, the woman question, the marriage ques-
tion, the labour question, in less one-sided and
more human ways. From this point of view
the establishment of the common school is much
more than a pedagogical question; it is the
vital question of our social order.
Men and women, upper and lower classes,
are walking on different sides of a wall. They
can stretch their hands over it; the important
thing to be done is to break the wall down.
The school, as described above, is the first
breach in this wall.
A school like this would be like leaven. The
many never reform the few; it is the few who
gradually introduce reforms for the many.
Because the few have strong enough dissatis-
faction with present defects, courage great
enough to show their disgust, a beUef in the
new truths real enough, they are ready to pre-
pare the ground for the future.
Such a school must be guided by the same
principle which has humanised morality and
law in other spheres. It must consider indi-
vidual peculiarities. Personal freedom will
thus have as few hindrances as possible to ob-
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struct it. The rights of others must not he
approached too close. The limits, where the
rights of others can he aflfected, must he main-
tained, even enlarged.
This humanising process will he introduced
into the schools, when scholars are no longer
regarded as classes, hut each individual for
himself. The schools will then commence to
fulfil one of the many conditions necessary to
give young people real nourishment and so de-
velop them and make them happy.
Such a school life will make its first aim to
discover in early years uncommon talent, to
direct such talent to special studies.
Secondly, for those who lack definite talent,
a plan of study will he arranged, in which their
individuaUty too can he developed, and their
intellectual tension increased. This condition
is, if possihle, more important than the first,
for imusual talents are accompanied hy greater
power of self -conservation. Ordinary or lesser
talented people, i,e.j the larger majority, are
rather confused hy a plurality of studies and
are much easier impaired, as personalities, hy
the imiformity of the prevailing system.
The rights of unusually gifted people, and
those of other classes too, can he considered
when, as mentioned ahove, the school curricu-
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Soul Murder in the Schools 213
lum is so arranged, that certain subjects are
studied during part of the school year, another
class of subjects during another part. More-
over, certain subjects are to be studied at dif-
ferent times, not finished once for all.
The instruction must be so arranged that
real independent study, under the direction of
the teacher, will be the ordinary method. The
presentation of the subject by the teacher will
be the exception, a treat for holidays, not for
every day.
The instruction too must take the scholar
to the real thing, as far as possible, not direct
him to report about the thing. Such a school
must break up absolutely the whole system of
lecturing, arranged in concentric circles. In
certain cases, it must return to the methods of
the old-fashioned school, which concentrated
its attention on humanistic study. But dead
languages should not be the subjects around
which its studies should centre.
Early specialisation must be allowed, where
there are distinct individual tendencies for such
work;
Concentration on certain subjects at certain
points of time;
Independent work during the whole period
of school;
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214 The Century of the Child
Contact with reality in the whole school cur-
riculum; — ^these must be the four comer-stones
of the new school.
But the time is far distant still, when gov-
ernment schools will begin to build on this
basis. What follows is meant, therefore, to
apply, not to the great revolutions of school
systems indicated above, but deals with im-
provements to take place at present.
Learning lessons should be assigned to
school hours as in France. Children should
have an entirely free day in the week; study at
home should be confined to the reading of liter-
ary works, tales of travel, and the like, which
teachers can recommend in combination with
the studies pursued at school.
Tasks done at home are inconvenient; they
do not increase the independence of the
scholar; they are prepared as a rule with ex-
cessively free and often unwise help from the
parents. At school such work would be done
as a rule without help; besides, it is individual
and quickly finished.
In the school, time can be taken for study
selected at the scholar*s free choice. It can
be arranged for in the following way. Take
a class of about twelve scholars; in larger
classes no reasonable or personal method of
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Soul Murder in the Schools 215
instruction is possible. There may be three
scholars with distinct tastes, one for history,
one for languages, one for mathematics.
There may be two without any distinct talent
for mathematics or languages. The other seven
may have ordinary capacities. The first three
must, during the whole term, apply themselves
specially in certain hours, set aside for inde-
pendent study, each in his chosen subject.
The first will read some historical work on the
periods taken up in the history class; the sec-
ond will devote this time to mathematics; the
third will read the books in foreign languages,
mentioned in the language course. The
other seven with ordinary gifts can devote this
time to ordinary reading and handwork. In
this way all will get some portion of history,
mathematics, and languages, but those who are
specially interested will have the opportunity
of going deeper into the subject. If one of
the three gifted scholars shows a great inclina-
tion for and a ready comprehension of all three
subjects, he shoidd study by himself at home,
provided the more thorough study of one sub-
ject does not impair work on the other. The
two who have special difficulty in mathematics
or languages coidd either substitute one sub-
ject wholly for the other, or in those periods
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remain away from school, or, finally, the hours
used hy gifted scholars for individual study
beyond the requirements of the common course
could be devoted by these to work, under the
teacher's supervision, in the coiu-se common
to the whole class.
To carry out this plan, there is need of such
concentration of subjects as I have men-
tioned; there should be never more than one
or at most two main subjects — ^history, geo-
graphy, natural science — studied at once.
Moreover no more than one language should
be studied at the same time; practice in those
already learnt is to be acquired by literary
readings, written resumes, and conversation.
Another kind of concentration is necessary.
Not every subject should be split up into
subdivisions but history should be made to in-
clude literary history, church history, etc. In
geography at the early stage, a part of natu-
ral science should be included, and the history
of art combined with both. Another not less
important method implied in concentration is
in all general courses to direct one's attention
to the main questions, and to sacrifice the mass
of details. Detailed work should not have
been incorporated, as indispensable for general
culture (from generation to generation), dur-
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Soul Murder in the Schools 217
ing the constant growth of the contents of
knowledge.
In regard to instruction, methods now pop-
ular should be forced out of the field. The
two obligatory features, the careful hearing of
lessons by the teacher, and the equally care-
ful preparation of the next lesson, must be
changed for other methods according to the
age of the scholar, the special character of the
subject, and of the scholar himself; or accord-
ing to the particular stage of the subject. At
one time the teacher should give an attractive,
comprehensive account of a period, a character,
a land, a natural phenomenon. Another time
it will be enough to give a simple, introductory
reference to the reading of one or more works
on the subject, best of all an original author-
ity. Sometimes he shoidd require an oral ac-
count of what he has said, or what has been
read; sometimes this should be done in writ-
ing. When the lesson is filled with many
facts the scholar should write them down in
the hour; another time he should smnmarise
them from memory. An assigned amount
too can be gone through along with the teach-
er's explanation; on another occasion, the as-
signment need not be gone over at all, but the
scholars could show their capacity to under-
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stand it and comprehend it without assistance.
Occasionally the task might he done in a short
time from one day to another, sometimes it
might take a longer period.
But this work woidd, as has heen said, take
place ordinarily in the schoql. Purely literary
readings and hooks of a similar type must he
assigned for work at home, to be done during
a considerable length of time. For we all
know that the reading which has made a deep
impression on us was only what was read
freely; reading for which we ourselves could
set the time, place, and inclination. And since,
in this case, the important thing is the impres-
sion, not the knowledge, freedom is more im-
portant than in other subjects. Individual
initiative can be furthered by having the
teacher, as is done in France, explain in pass-
ing all words and subjects in a poem diflScult
to understand. The teacher too should now
and then, by reading poetry aloud, stimulate
the desire of the scholar to learn more of the
same poet. A poem has the greatest effect
when it is presented unexpectedly. When a
history lesson is ended there should be read
aloud a passage from an historical poem.
Scholars do not forget either the poem, or the
episode handled in it, even if they forget every-
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Soul Murder in the Schools 219
thing else. But test questions, used in the
period of literature-study, go in at one ear and
out at the other.
A teacher who wishes to use this con-
centrated system in detail, that rests on the
intelligent co-operation of the scholar, will nat-
urally find that the method is to he derived
from the personaUty of the teacher himself. I
think the teacher of history should not take
up the prehistoric period, hut should give thc^
scholar some good popular work on it and let
him go to a museum; he should then require a
written essay, to he illustrated hy the scholar
with drawings of characteristic types of arch-
aeological specimens. In the same way, he
coidd give a comparative view of the same pe-
riod among other people. Then, if there were
a scholar especially anxious to learn, he could
put in his hands a work about the primitive
condition of man. Every teacher, man or
woman, can easily think out, for the subjects
they teach, analogous methods. The teacher
of geography who is talking about Siberia
can give some good general description of it
to all the scholars for their private study.
Those particidarly interested would be re-
commended to read a narrative of travels in
Siberia, Dostojewsky's Out of the Dead
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22 o The Century of the Child
House, and so on. It the teacher of history
were taking up Napoleon, he could read in the
French hour a work like Vigny*s Servitude
et Grandeur MiUtaire. For the Dutch War
of Independence, Motley's history, Gk^ethe's
Egmont, and Schiller's Don Carlos could he
read. A whole hook could be written on plans
like these, with indications how the different
fields of knowledge coidd supplement one
another, how history, geography, literature,
and art coidd be intertwined just as on the
other side geography and natural science.
Similarly it would show how diflferent teachers
could be of use to one another in communicat-
ing to their scholars a fuller knowledge.
I should like to propose an hypothesis for
discussion and examination that I have formu-
lated, after a wide experience in story-telling,
both as a listener and as a narrator. If I might
put together in a statement, without intending
to prove it, the residt of my experience in the
subject named, I should say that the mental
food which is most attractive for the child, also
gives the most nourishment. This is the fact
that the physiology of our day has proved in
the case of the organic existence of the child.
Pedagogy is beginning, consciously or imcon-
sciously, to apply it to the mental sphere, yet
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Soul Murder in the Schools 221
without daring to hold that nature is so simple,
that need and incHnation can he so nearly re-
lated. Naturally, it cannot he maintained that
what is most attractive for children's stories
should constitute their whole training, as phy-
siology maintains that what tastes most agree-
able to the child, for example sugar, should
form his sole noiuishment.
What every story-teller finds as specially
attractive to children, is the epic smoothness,
the clear comprehensiveness of the tale, its con-
sistent objectivity. Every narrative which
will win the attention of the child, whether
it be from Scandinavian, classical, or bibli-
cal history, must have these characteristics
of the tale. There are hardly any story-tell-
ers who so completely absorb children as old
nurses* They never forget any picturesque
trait in the tale, they always give the same
broad, full narrative. They teU their stories
without explanations and without applica-
tions, with the real direct feeling of the child
for grasping the subject. Ever3i;hing which
disturbs the smooth flow of the narrative, above
all, when the narrator puts himself outside of
it by indulging in a joke, strikes the child as a
profound incongruity. Children are always
more or less artistic in their nature, in the sense
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222 The Century of the Child
that they desire to receive an impression in
its purity, not as a means to something else.
They wish through the story to go through a
real experience; at the same time they will
say "No/* if they are asked whether they
would prefer to hear a real history to a story.
This apparent contradiction can he explained
in this way: the tale presents reaUty, as
reality is conceived of hy the naive fancy of
early ages, and is in just the form in which
the imagination of the child can receive it.
In teUing stories, we find, besides, that what
attracts children is the narrative of actions;
in this roundabout way they get hold of
emotions and sentiments. The development
of the child — ^this is a truth which has to be
worked out before it can really be taken in —
answers in miniature to the development of
mankind as a whole. And it follows from
this that children combine idealism and real-
ism, as epic national poetry does* Great, good,
heroic, supernatural traits affect them most;
but only in a concrete shape sensibly perceived,
with the richness of the power which comes
from life, without any adaptation to our pre-
sent conceptions.
We can test this by teUing a real folk-lore
tale, and Anderson's version of it. With a
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Soul Murder in the Schools 223
few exceptions children are unanimous in call-
ing the first type the most beautiful.
Besides what is attractive for lively children,
with sound appetites, is quantity, but in no
way multiplicity.
First of all they ask whether the story is
long after they have begun to hope that it is
beautiful. They are glad to hear the same
story innumerable times; they have an imcon-
scious need for thorough assimilation, just as
soon as what is given to them harmonises with
their stage of development. This is true of
all subjects. I know children who detest the
"choice stories" from the Bible, with which
their morning prayers are commenced, but who
read the New Testament as a story-book. In
this respect, all small children are like great
ones, the artists. The imagination of child-
ren requires full, entire, deep impressions, as
material for their energies that are incessantly
creating and reconstructing. And if their
sound feeling has not been disturbed by
a duaUsm foreign to them it brings them with
remarkably sure instinct to choose the sound,
pure, and beautiful, and to reject the im-
sound, hateful, and crude. Finally, we find
in story-telling that children much prefer
continuity of impressions though they are said
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224 The Century of the Child
to express preference for change. We never
hear children say, " Now tell a funny story,
the one before was too gloomy." But if we
commence telling gloomy stories they want
one after another of the same type. If we
had begun teUing amusing stories, they never
tire of laughing. The changeableness of
children in playing, reading, and working is
not so general a characteristic of childish
nature as is believed. It is true only of child-
ren whose readings and games are not adapted
to their nature and inclinations. Changeable-
ness is, in a certain way, nature's self-defence
against what is unconsciously injurious.
As to comic narratives, it is found in story-
telling that the child has the most keen sense
for the humour of a situation. On the other
hand they have hardly a trace of feeling for
the humour that rests on deep intellectual
contrasts, least of all for humour of the ironi-
cal type. If a narrative out of their own world
is really to make impression on them, it must
be like a tale, full of life, with action and sur-
prises, broad and naive in its style, without
any noticeable aim. All the children's books
which children through their life recollect and
by which they are impressed, are those that
at least in one way or another fulfil these con-
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Soul Murder in the Schools 225
ditions. The rest give other impressions, hut
even so they become no more harmless than
arsenic wall-paper covered by fresh undyed
layers. As to the humour of children, it can
be easily tested. We can tell them the most
comic psychological children's stories; ninety-
nine out of a hundred they will declare to be
terribly stupid, while a simple history pre-
senting a funny situation doubles them up
with laughter.
Children do not feel drawn to abstract
things; this is an old truth, whose correctness
is established best by story-telling. All vir-
tues and qualities, no matter how well con-
cealed they may be, are very quickly
pronounced stupid by children. For fables,
children have seldom any taste, least of all for
essays. The introduction of a fox or a bear
into the story or in a real adventure makes
the story-teller the dearest friend of children.
But the most lively and childish essay on the
bear or the fox leaves them cold, imless it is
made real by some personal experience in the
country or by a visit to a zoological garden.
This truth is so recognised and proved from
so many points of view, that I will simply say
here that experience in story-telling gives ad-
ditional evidence of it. Children show, in
IS
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226 The Century of the Child
listening to stories, a finely developed sensi-
tiveness to all attempts to descend to, or to
adopt, the standpoint of the child, to every-
thing that is artificial in the narrative. In
intercourse with children, especially with those
who represent progressive methods, can be
seen how the reaction against the old lesson
and hidebound methods has produced an arti-
ficial naivete, a richness of illustrations, and a
liveliness that children soon feel as something
specially prepared for them, something not
quite real. This way of partially giving to
children their own imaginative power puts
them to sleep, even when it succeeds at first in
giving them a good entertainment in their les-
sons. For the illustrations and comparisons,
as well as the consequences which another has
thought out for them, obstruct the initiative of
the child; besides they are all soon forgotten.
It is the same with playthings ; those they make
themselves give inexhaustible pleasure, while
those that are ready made only confer joy once
or twice. They are shown and then broken
in pieces in order to extract the clockwork, for
this is the only possible way for the child to
do something with it himself. Instruction is
begimiing to resemble children's playthings
and children's books; it is too complete, too
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Soul Murder in the Schools 227
richly illustrated. It hinders individual free
voyages of discovery of the imagination.
Even good illustrations are often injurious;
but we do not intend to speak at length on this
subject. As a matter of fact children often
feel themselves deceived by illustrations.
The reserve in a story is also a property that
attracts the child. Its pictures are indicated
with a few definite but repeated details. The
imagination is allowed to fill the picture with
colours. The uniformity, the rhythm, and
the symmetry, all qualities belonging to the
folk-lore tale, are for the child extremely ab-
sorbing. They enjoy such repetitions as
" the first, second, and third year " and so on,
quite like the refrain in rhyme and poetry.
But all these observations lead to a final re-
sult. The present reading-book system is
neither the most attractive for children, nor
does it best supply them with what they want.
Instead of epic smoothness and unity, reading-
books bring a confused mixture of all kinds,
nursery rhymes, religious teaching, poetry,
natural history, and history. Occasionally
there comes a tale or a real poem, standing
apart distinctly from its neighbours, in tone
and in comprehensiveness. Instead of clear
impressions, children get through the reading-
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book a disturbing jiunble; instead of objec-
tivity, they get instructive children's stories;
instead of poetry, edifying versification; in-
stead of action, reflection; instead of much of
one thing, a little of everything; instead of
continuity of impressions, constant change;
instead of concrete impressions of life, essays;
instead of naive tales, things written down to
their level.
I ask what is the result of this reading-book
system on the development of the child from
six to sixteen years old?
What, in general, is the result on the de-
velopment of character when one flits from
impression to impression, nipping in flight at
different things, letting one picture after an-
other slip away, making no halt anjrwhere?
As to the effect on adults, immediate an-
swers can be given. These answers are so
unfavourable that they do not need to be re-
peated. But, should a principle which applies
to the adult be less suitable for the child? It
really applies much more to the child. Adults
generally have some work, some occupation,
some one centre around which they can
arrange manifold events, change may often be
advantageous for them; but the whole school
day of the child is change; the way the child
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Soul Murder in the Schools 229
absorbs knowledge is by the teaspoonful. Is
not this condition enough to urge us to work
with all our might against the system of dif-
fusion wherever it is unnecessary?
In reading-books diffusion is not necessary;
in foreign languages, as in his own tongue, the
interest of the child is much more stimulated
by a book than by a reader; his vocabulary is
increased. But even if this were not the case,
what the child gains through reading-books,
in quick readiness in the mother tongue or in
foreign languages, does not compensate for
the loss their use signifies in development
in the way already mentioned.
The schools deal improperly with the mental
powers of youth, through their lack of special-
ising, of concentration, in their depreciation
of initiative, in their being out of touch with
reality.
High schools and colleges are absolutely de-
structive to personality. Here, where only
oral examinations should take place from time
to time, where all studies should tend to be
individual, the hunger of the scholar for reality
is hardly satisfied in any direction. Nothing
is done to help his longing to see for him-
self, to read, to judge, to get impressions at
first-hand, not from second-hand reports.
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:^3^ The Century of the Child
Certainly here, too, the direction of the
xeacher is necessary. He can economise super-
fluous work hy clarifying generalisations; he
can criticise a one-sided account in order to
complete the picture fully himself. Often the
teacher must excite interest hy a vigorous ac-
count from his own point of view; by a fine
psychological study, he can illustrate a com-
plex historical picture. He will help the
scholar to find laws, governing the phenomena
which he has come to know by his own experi-
ments, or he can suggest comparisons which
lead to such experiments. Here, also, oral and
written exercise must have great weight.
But the end of all instruction in college, as
in the school, should not consist in examina-
tions and diplomas; these must be obliterated
from the face of the earth. The aim should
be that the scholars themselves, at first hand,
should acquire their knowledge, should get
their impressions, should form their opinions,
should work their way through to intellectual
tastes, not as they now do, taking no trouble
themselves, but being supposed to acquire these
gifts through interesting lectures given by the
teacher on five different subjects, heard every
morning while the students are dozing, and
soon forgotten. Facts slip away from every
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Soul Murder in the Schools 231
one's memory, quickest from the memory of
those who have learned according to the dose
and teaspoonful system. But education hap-
pily is not simply the knowledge of facts, it is,
as an admirable paradox has put it, what is
left over after we have forgotten all we have
learnt.
The richer one is in such permanent ac-
quisitions, the greater the profit of study. The
more subjective pictures we have; the more
numerous our vibrating emotions and associa-
tions of ideas are; the more we are filled with
suggestively active impressions; — so much the
more development we have, won by study for
our personality. The fact that our students
acquire so little, even if they have passed
through every school with excellent marks, is
a serious injustice they feel during their whole
life. The beautifully systematised, ticketed,
checkerboard knowledge given by examina-
tions soon disappears. The person who has
kept his desire for knowledge and his capacity
for work by his free choice and by his inde-
pendent labor can easily fill out the gaps left
by this method of study in the knowledge he
has acquired.
Only the person who by knowledge has
obtained a view of the great connected system
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232 The Century of the Child
of existence, the connection between nature
and man's life, between the present and the
past, between peoples and ideas, cannot lose
his education. Only the person who, through
the mental nourishment he has received, sees
more clearly, feels more ardently, has absorbed
completely the wealth of life, has been really
educated. This education can be gained in
the most irregular way, perhaps around the
hearth or in the field, on the seashore or in the
wood; it can be acquired from old tattered
books or from nature itself. It can be terribly
incomplete, very one-sided, but how real, per-
sonal, and rich it appears to those who for the
period of fifteen years in school have groimd
out the wheat on strange fields, like oxen with
muzzled mouths! Our age cries for person-
ality; but it will ask in vain, until we let our
children live and learn as personalities, until
we allow them to have their own will, think
their own thoughts, work out their own know-
ledge, form their own judgments ; or, to put the
matter briefly, until we cease to suppress
the raw material of personality in schools,
vainly hoping later on in life to revive it again.
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CHAPTER VI
THE SCHOOL OF THE FDTUEE
I SHOULD like to set down here briefly my
dreams of a future school, in which the per-
sonality may receive a free and complete self-
development. I purposely say "dreams,"
because I do not want any one to believe that
I am pretending in the following outline to
give a reformed programme for the present
time.
My first dream is that the kindergarten
and the primary school will be everywhere re-
placed by instruction at home.
Undoubtedly a great influence has pro-
ceeded from that whole movement which has
resulted, among other things, in the Pesta-
lozzi-Froebel kindergartens, and in institu-
tions modelled after them. Better teachers
have been produced by it; but what I regard
as a great misfortune, is the increasing inclin-
ation to look upon the creche, the kindergar-
ten, and the school as the ideal scheme of
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234 The Century of the Child
education. Every discussion dealing with the
possibilities of women working in public life
exalts the advantage of freeing the mother
from the care of children, emancipating child-
ren from the improper care of their mothers,
and giving women possibilities of work outside
of the home. Mrs. Perkins Stetson proposes
as a compromise, that every mother, pedagogi-
cally qualified, shall take care of a group of
children along with her own. But what her
own chadren will receive under such condi-
tions is suflSciently shown in the case of those
poor children who grow up in educational in-
stitutions presided over by their parents; and
also by the experience of the poor parents who
are not able under these conditions to look
after their own children.
The creche and the kindergarten were and
continue to be a blessing undoubtedly for those
innumerable mothers who work outside of
their homes and are badly prepared for their
duties. Some type of kindergarten will per-
haps be necessary under particular circum-
stances as a partial substitute for the home, as,
for example, when a child has no companions
to play with, or when the mother herself is
disinclined or not able to educate the child.
This incapacity is ordinarily the result of an
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The School of the Future 235
extremely nervous temperament, caused by
weak will or depression.
Mary WoUstonecraft's remarks, made more
than a hundred years ago, still call for our ap-
proval. " If children are not physically mur-
dered by their ignorant mothers, they are
ruined psychically by the inability of the
mother to bring them up. Mothers, in those
first six years that determine the whole de-
velopment of the child^s character, turn them
over to the hands of servants, whose authority
is often undermined by the way in which they
are treated. Then children are passed on to
school to control the bad behaviour which
the vigilance of the mother could have pre-
vented, and which she controls with means that
become the basis for all kinds of vices." But
because such cases are still frequent and be-
cause there will always be mothers incapable
of bringing their children up, it would be a
premature assumption to believe that the ma-
jority of women cannot be trained to become
parents, if the development of the woman has
this end in view. One of the tasks of the fu-
ture is the creation of a generation of trained
mothers, who among other things will eman-
cipate children from the kindergarten system.
Children are handled in crowds from two and
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236 The Century of the Child
three years up, they are made to appear be-
fore the public in crowds, made to work on
the one plan, made to do the same petty,
idiotic, and useless tasks. In this way, we be-
lieve at the present time that we are fonmng
men, while actually we are only training units.
Any one who remembers how, as a child, he
played on the beach or in the wood, in a big
nursery or in an old-fashioned attic, or has
seen other children playing in these surround-
ings, will know how such unrestrained play
deepens the soul, increases the capacity for
invention, and stimulates the imagination a
hundredfold more than children's games and
occupations devised by the arrangement, and
promoted by the interference, of elder persons.
Adults are accustomed to amuse children in
crowds, a custom which comes from intellec-
tual vulgarity, instead of leaving them alone
to amuse themselves. Besides this system en-
courages children to produce what they do not
need, and leads them to imagine that they are
working by so doing. Children should be
taught to despise all the numerous unneces-
sary things which put life on a false level and
make it artificial. They should be taught to
try to simplify it, to aim for its supreme values ;
this should be the end of education. The Mn-
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The School of the Future 237
dergarten system is, on the contrary, one of
the most effective means to produce the weak
dilletante and the self-satisfied average man.
If there is any further need for the kinder-
garten in the near or distant future, let it be a
place where children may have the same free-
dom as cats or dogs, to play by themselves,
and for themselves, to think out something of
their own, where they can be provided with
means to carry out their own plans, where they
have companions to play with them. A sen-
sible woman may be near at hand to look on
or to supervise, but only to interfere when
the children are likely to hurt themselves. Let
her draw something for them occasionally, tell
them a story, or teach them an amusing game,
but otherwise let her be apparently quite pas-
sive and yet untiringly active in the observation
of the traits of character and of disposition
which play of this free type reveals. In like
manner the mother should observe the play of
children, their treatment of their companions
at play, their inclinations, and collect as much
material as she can but interfere as little di-
rectly as possible. The mother finally by
this constant, many-sided, strenuous, yet pas-
sive kind of observation gets a knowledge of
the child that is partially exact. One being
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238 The Century of the Child
never learns to know another being entirely,
not even when that being has received its life
from the other, not even when that life is daily
renewed by the other being, in order to reach
the full happiness of spiritual motherhood. It
has been well said that as people regard the
birth of a child as the sign of physical ma-
turity, the education of a child is regarded as
a sign of psychical maturity. But through
lack in psychological insight, most parents re-
main their whole life immature. They can
have the best principles, the most zealous fi-
delity to duty, combined with absolute blind-
ness to the nature of children, the real causes
of their actions, and the different combinations
of different characteristics.
Take some examples of the worst blunders
of this type; the small child is often called
vain who studies, full of interest, his own
identity in the glass; the child who, from fear
or confusion at a hard or incomprehensible
question, does not answer or obey is called
stubborn; the child that cannot explain his
actions in those small things which adults every
day entirely forget is looked upon as lying;
and even before the child has a conception of
the right of property, when he pilfers, he is
called thievish. The child who says that he
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The School of the Future 239
knows that he is naughty, and wants to he
naughty, is called obdurate and impertinent,
while this statement is really a self -confession
and shows a character to which one may ap-
peal with the best results. The child, sunk
in thought, who forgets the small things of
daily life, people call thoughtless. Even when
a child is really selfish and is really lying or
lazy, these characteristics are treated as if they
were something individual, while actually they
are caused often by some serious fault which
must be dealt with. These characteristics can
proceed from a good quality which may be de-
stroyed, if the fault is not treated suitably.
But even parents who now observe their
children with more psychological insight than
was used in earlier times are not able to study
them, if their children go to school and kinder-
garten at an early age. This want of insight
produces mistakes which often cause deep an-
tagonisms between children and their parents,
the sort of thing which now embitters so many
households. Only fathers and mothers who
reverence the individuality of their children,
and combine with this feeling a careful obser-
vation of them through their whole life, are
able to avoid this typical fault of our own
time. People expect to gather grapes from
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240 The Century of the Child
thistles, instead of being satisfied with haws.
Parents must see that they cannot create where
there is no material to be created. But they
must be capable of developing the characteris-
tics which they discover in the nature of their
children. This work they must undertake
with optimism and resignation, for it repre-
sents the teaching of real psychological study.
This will stop those efforts, painful alike for
children and parents, that are applied in
directions which offer no reward to effort.
But the study of the psychology of the child,
begim at its birth, continued in its play, its
work, its rest, means a daily comparative
study, and requires the undivided attention of
one person. It can only be done by a person
who has charge of but a few children; in a
crowd it is impossible. It is all the more im-
possible because children in a crowd resemble
one another more or less; and this makes ob-
servation more difficult.
The kindergarten is only a factory. Child-
ren learn in it to model, instead of making mud
pies according to their own taste. This pro-
cess is typical of what these small atoms of
humanity go through themselves. From the
first floor of the factory the objects that have
been turned out there are sent to the next floor
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The School of the Future 241
above, the school; and from this they then go
out put up in packages.
The aim of school training is to cany out,
with all its might, production by quantities
that expresses the demands of our time in all
spheres. The invention of individual school
methods may reduce the influence of " canned
education."
As long as there are large cities, poor child-
ren in them must be able to obtain the possi-
bilities of country children. Their playthings
must be made out of the world which sur-
roimds them. The obligations of their own
home must supply them with work. This is
altogether different from the play work of the
kindergarten that has no connection with the
seriousness of reality. A wise mother or
teacher will adopt from the kindergarten sys-
tem just so much as will enable her to teach
children to observe nature and their surround-
ings; will take from it what enables her to
make them combine their activity with some
useful end; their amusement with some kind
of knowledge.
The Froebel dictum, " Let us live for the
children," must be changed into a more signifi-
cant phrase, " Let us allow the children to live."
This, among other things, means " let them be
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242 The Century of the Child
emancipated from the burden of learning by
heart," from the forms of system, from the
pressure of the crowd, in those years while the
quiet, secret work of the soul is as vital for
them as the growing of the seed in the earth.
The kindergarten system is opposed to this;
it is forcing up the seed to life on a plate,
where it looks very pretty, but only for the
time being.
The school with its esprit de corps opens
the way public lack of conscience. Modem
society manages thus to reproduce the crimes
of every past period; manages too, to repro-
duce them through men who are conscientious
in their own private life. For those without
consciences, who lead criminal movements,
would never be able to put the masses of peo-
ple in motion, imless they were just masses
and nothing more; unless they were made to
follow collective laws of honour, collective pa-
triotic feelings, collective conceptions of duty.
The child learns to be obedient to his school,
to be loyal to his comrades, just as later on in
life he learns these qualities as they are pre-
sented in his imiversity, his student society,
and his profession. All of this he learns sooner
than to reverence his conscience, his feeling of
right, his individual impulse. He learns to
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The School of the Future 243
wink at, pardon, and disguise the sins com-
mitted by his own circle of companions, his
own club, and his own country.
This is the way the world produces its
"Dreyfus Affairs," its Transvaal Wars. If
the aim is to create men and not masses, we
should follow the educational programme of the
great statesman Stein — " to develop all those
impulses on which the value and strength of
mankind depend." This is only possible when
the child is taught, at the earliest age, the free-
dom and danger of his own choice, the right
and responsibility of his own will, the condi-
tions and duties of being put to the test him-
self. All of these elements of character are
unconsciously opposed by the kindergarten;
the home alone can develop them. The high-
est result of education is to bring the individual
into contact with his own conscience. This
does not mean that the individual cannot ex-
perience by degrees the happiness and the
necessity of being a factor in the service of the
whole, first in his home, then among his com-
panions and in his country, and finally in the
world. The difference is this : in the first case
the man is a living cell, co-operating and build-
ing up living forms; in the other he is a piece
of cut stone used in artificial construction.
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244 The Century of the Child
Both for the development of individuality,
as well as for the cultivation of the emotions,
the home is to be preferred to the kindergarten
and to the school. In the limited small circle
of the home the emotional element can be deep-
ened and tenderness can be developed, by the
acts called for in the realities of domestic life.
The kindergarten fibrst, and then the school,
free children from their natural individual ob-
ligations and put in their place demands that
can only be fulfilled en masse. The child en-
ters into a number of superficial relations.
This situation tends to make his emotions
superficial; here is the great danger of begin-
ning school life at a tender age. On the other
hand a one-sided home Hfe brings with it the
danger of concentrating the emotions to an
excess. Education at home in the years when
the emotions become harmonious and receive
their decisive training is just as important
for the child as is later on a pleasant sociable
life with others of the same age, after the
twelfth year is passed. All intellectual culti-
vation done according to the most excellent
method, all social feelings, are worthless un-
less they have as their basis an individual
development of the emotions. Somewhere in
our body we must have a heart, to act as a
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The School of the Future 245
real balance against our head. Only the man
who has learnt to love a few, deep enough to
die for them, is able to live profitably for the
many.
I should like to see not only the kindergar-
ten but the preparatory school transferred to
the home. There things can be considered
that are never taken into account in a general
school. The child need not have the nourish-
ment he does not want, and which he does not
need, at the time he now generally receives it.
In the home school, one child can put off
reading to a later age, another can be taught
reading early. The desire for action in one
child can be satisfied; the book-hunger of the
other encouraged. Bodily development, the
desire to make a real acquaintance with ex-
ternal nature can be considered in home work,
play, and out-of-door activities. Then we can
begin to teach when the child himself asks for
teaching; that is, when he wishes to hear or
do something in which knowledge alone can
assist him. The child can twice as easily
learn at ten years, under these conditions, what
he now learns at eight; at eight what he now
learns at six, if he comes to his study with de-
veloped powers of observation and an eager
desire for action. Schools can never attain a
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246 The Century of the Child
full insight into the peculiar character of per-
sonality, into the ways in which knowledge
must be placed before different individuals,
into the right time for taking a subject or
giving it up. The home school must be
considered the ideal method where the child
studies with a small group of well-selected
companions. Individuality can be considered,
plans of study and courses can be neglected.
Through such neglect only, is a real living
instruction possible. The advantages the
modern school has over the home are hardly
worth discussing. The order of the school,
its method, system, and discipline, so much
praised by its advocates as advantages, are,
from my point of view, nothing but disad-
vantages. Habits of fulfilling duties, or
work, orderly and punctual activity, that be-
long to a sound education, can be attained in
the home school through far less artificial
means. Of course it is urged as another ad-
vantage of the school that the school child
becomes a member of a small conmiunity
where he learns social duties. But the home
is the natural community where the child, in
full seriousness, learns the real social duties
of readiness to help, and readiness to act,
while the present-day school artificially re-
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The School of the Future 247
places that domestic social education, of which
the child is now robbed by studies at school
and preparation at home. The real value of
school life among companions can be had
from the home school without its ordinary
dangers. These dangers are not only evil in-
fluences, but, more than anything else, that
collective process of reaching a standard of
stupidity, due to the pressure of public opinion
that comes from association in masses. The
fear of common opinion, of being laughed at,
is created in the receptive years of childhood,
so open to such influences. The slightest de-
viation in dress, or taste, is criticised unspar-
ingly. If an investigation were conducted
on the sufferings of children through the tyr-
anny of their fellows, a tyranny which some-
times takes harsher, sometimes milder forms,
it would upset the prejudice that the usefulness
of the school in this respect cannot be replaced.
Besides there is the levelling pressure of a
uniform discipline, which stunts personality
from above, while life with school companions
restricts it on all sides. Every criticism on
this formal pedantry is met with the answer,
" In a school it is absolutely impossible to per-
mit children to do what can be done in the
household; only fancy if all children in the
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248 The Century of the Child
school were to sharpen their lead pencils or
erase words in their exercises." There is no
need to insist further on this point. Hund-
reds of petty rules must exist, we are told, for
the sake of discipline. And even if the rules
could he reduced to a fourth of their present
cuhic contents, even the best schools would
still feel the pressure of uniformity. The
more this pressure is resisted by individuals,
so much the better.
Education in the first years must aim to
strengthen individuality. The whole of bio-
graphical literature suppHes an almost uni-
form proof of the importance of not
commencing too early the levelling social
education of the school. Early attendance at
school is one of the reasons why we so fre-
quently meet, as Dumas says, so many clever
children, and so many stupid adults.
Almost all great men and women, who have
thought and created for themselves, have re-
ceived either no education in school at all, or
have gone to school at a rather later period,
with longer or shorter interruptions, or have
been trained in different schools. In most
cases it was an accident, some living point of
view, a book read in secret, a personal choice
of subject that gave these exceptional be-
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The School of the Future 249
ings their training. In this respect Goethe's
education was ideal, considered apart from
some pedantry due to his father's influence.
At his mother's work-table he learnt to know
the Bible; French he learnt from a theatrical
company; English from a language master,
in company with his father; Italian, because he
heard his sister being taught the language;
mathematics from a friend in the household,
a study which Goethe applied immediately,
first in cardboard diagrams, later in architec-
tural drawings. His essays he prepared in the
form of a correspondence in different lan-
guages between different relatives, scattered in
various parts of the world. Geography he eag-
erly studied in books of travel in order to be
able to give his narrative local colour. He
knocked about with his father, learnt to ob-
serve different kinds of handwork, and also
to try himself small experiments of his own
skiU.
But some one may say, all men are not
geniuses, and accordingly the majority without
distinct talent need the school. Is it possible
that the connection between originality and ir-
regular attendance at school is merely acciden-
tal? How often does the school sin in its
watering down of originality! As for imori-
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250 The Century of the Child
ginal people, the argument urged here is an
application of the bibUcal axiom, that from him
who has nothing even the little will be taken
away. I mean the individual who has no dis-
tinct personaUty will be forced in the school to
give up the little that he can call his own. The
old-fashioned school where a few subjects were
learnt by heart, where the teachers were often
badly prepared, where the students could go
to sleep or pretend to learn, where the courses
were simple and attention concentrated on
Latin, seems barbarous to us. But it had less
danger for the personality than the present-
day school with its thorough preparation, its
interest in readings, its perfected methods,
its capital instructors who take every little
stone out of the student's road, and prepare as
much delightful intellectual nourishment as
possible, sometimes even in a cooked-up form.
This "good school" with its over-insistence
on versatility is responsible for the nervous-
ness of our day. Its general intellectual
apathy has caused the negativeness of our
times.
The quietest, most obedient child is thought
the best pupil, that is, the most impersonal
individual is the model. So we see how the
school confuses its conception of values. The
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The School of the Future 251
more the soul and body are passive, are will-
ing to be controlled and receptive, so much
the better are the results from the school
standpoint. Mischievous children, obstinate
characters, one-sided and original natures, are
always martyrs at school because of their de-
sire for action, their spirit of opposition, their
so-called " stupidity." Only the easy-going,
amiable, commonly endowed natures can keep
some of their own individual tendencies, slip
through the school, and at the same time get
good certificates of industry, moral character,
order, and progress. In the first-class modern
school, the mobile structure of personality is
forced into shape — or rather it is knocked
about by wind and waves, like a pebble on the
seashore. It is struck by one wave after an-
other, day by day, term by term; on they
come — ^forty-five minutes for religious in-
struction, the same period for history, then
French, then sloyd, then natural history; the
next day new subjects in new, small doses. In
the afternoon, there is preparation at home,
and writing exercises, previously arranged and
marked out, then corrected with care, and the
prepared readings made the basis of ques-
tioning by the most approved methods, the
mother having at home first gone over them
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with the child. These powerful billows stu-
pefy the brain, and take the edge oflF the souls
of both teacher and scholar. Even the most
active teachers move along fettered by re-
quirements and prejudices, unconditional ne-
cessities and methodical principles. Only
occasionally is a soul saved from this fate by
total skepticism. Some exalt this pettifog-
ging professionalism to a plan of salvation,
others are untiringly busy in changing details,
in discussing minor improvements. Every real
thoroughgoing reform aflFecting the principle,
not the methods alone, goes to pieces, because
it conflicts with the system supported by the
state. It fails, through the obedient accept-
ance of the system on the part of parents,
through the incapacity of teachers to look at
the whole results of the system, through their
disinclination to all radical methods of
improvement.
The school, like the home and society, in
general should aim to fight more vigorously
and more successfully the influences belittling
life, and should further its development to-
wards ever higher forms. This end is opposed
by the modern schools. It is a gross mistake
to hold up their exceUect material and their
number as proofs of popular culture. How
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The School of the Future 253
the people are educated in the schools, how the
material is used, what subjects are pursued
in them are the momentous questions.
Gtoethe's saying that "fortune is the de-
velopment of our capacities " is as applicable
to children as to adults. What these capaci-
ties are can be determined soon in the case of
the talented child; his future can be secured
by obtaining for him the possibiUty of such a
development. But there are common capaci-
ties, proper to every normal human being, and
from their development, fortime too can be
the outcome. Among such capacities is mem-
ory, which modem man has nearly destroyed.
" We throw ashes," says Max Miiller, " every
day on the glowing coals of memory while
men of past ages could retain in their minds
the treasures of our present literature." To
these capacities belong, among others, power
of thought, not in the sense of philosophic
thinking, but in the simpler use of the word,
gifts of observation, ability to draw conclu-
sions and to exercise judgment. Of the com-
mon imiversal human faculties the emotions
suffer most at the hand of the modem school.
One of the fundamentally wrong pedagogi-
cal assumptions, is that mathematics and
grammar develop the understanding. This
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254 The Century of the Child
is only true after a higher stage is reached in
these courses. But there is no one who seri-
ously maintains that, so far as nature or man
is concerned, he has used directly or indirectly,
in a single observation, conclusion, or exercise
of judgment, the theses, hypotheses, state-
ments, problems, the rules and exceptions, of
mathematics and granmiar, with which his
childish brain was burdened. I have heard
from mathematicians and philologians the
same heresy that I am proclaiming, that
mathematics and granunar, when they are not
pursued as sciences, must be reduced to a
mmimum. Provided a person has mathema-
tical talent, the study of mathematics is
naturally agreeable, through the development
of a capacity in a certain direction. If one
has the gift for languages, the same is true of
linguistic study. But without such special
talent, these subjects have no educational
value, because the powers of observation,
drawing conclusions, exercising judgment,
are just as undeveloped as they were before
the mathematical problem was solved or the
grammatical rules learned.
Life — ^the life of nature and of man — ^this
alone is the preparation for life. What the
world of nature and the world of man offers
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The School of the Future 255
in the way of living forms, objects of beauty,
types of work, processes of development, can,
by natural history, geography, history, art, and
literature, give real value to memory; can
teach the understanding to observe, to judge
and distinguish; can train the feeling to be-
come intense, and through its intensity com-
bine the varying material in that unity which
alone is education. In brief, real things are
what the home and school should offer child-
ren in broad, rich, and warm streams. But
the streams should not be taken off in canals
and dammed up by methods, systems, divisions
of courses, and examinations.
I never read a pedagogical discussion with-
out the fine words " self -activity, individual
development, freedom of choice," suggesting
to me the music which accompanies the sacri-
ficial feasts of cannibals. The moment these
words are used, limitations and reservations
are introduced by their advocates. Their
proposed application is ludicrously insignifi-
cant, in contrast with the great principle in
the name of which they urge these changes.
And so the pupil continues to be sacrificed to
educational ideals, pedagogical systems, and
examination requirements, that they refuse to
abandon. The everlasting sin of the school
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256 The Century of the Child
against children is to be always talking about
the child.
The sloyd system (manual dexterity, hand-
work, artistic production) has certain good
results on children. Accordingly the sloyd
must be introduced into the school, and all
must be made to share the advantages of this
training; but there are children for whom the
sloyd is as inappropriate and as useless a re-
quirement as learning Latin. The child who
wants to devote himself to his books should
be no more forced to take up the sloyd, than
the child who is happy with l\is planing table
should be dragged to literature.
All talk about " harmonious training " must
be given the place where it belongs — ^in the
pedagogical culinary science. Certainly har-
monious development is the finest result of
man's training, but it is only to be attained by
his own choice. It implies a harmony between
the real capacities of the individual, not a har-
mony worked up from a pedagogical f oUnula.
The results from the school kneading trough
with its mince-meat processes are something
quite different.
Isolated reforms in the modern school have
no significance; they will continue to have
none, until we prepare for the great revolu-
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The School of the Future 257
tion, which will smash to pieces the whole pre-
sent system and will leave not one stone of it
upon another. Undoubtedly a " Deluge " of
pedagogy must come, in which the ark need
only contain Montaigne, Rousseau, Spencer,
and the modern literature of the psychology of
the child. When the ark comes to dry land
man need not build schools but only plant
vineyards where teachers will be employed to
bring the ripe grapes to the children, who now
get only a taste of the juice of culture in a
thin watery mixture.
The school has only one great end, to
make itself imnecessary, to allow life and
fortune, which is another way of saying self-
activity, to take the place of system and
method.
From the kindergarten period on the child
is now, as has been said, a material moulded,
sometimes by hostile, sometimes by friendly
hands. The mildest, the apparently freest
methods produce imiformity by insisting on
the same work, the same impression, the same
regulations, day by day, year by year. Be-
sides in the school, classes are never arranged
according to the child's temperament and
tendency, but according to his age and know-
ledge. So he is condemned in deadly tedious-
ly
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258 The Century of the Child
ness to waste an infinite amount of time while
he is waiting for others.
The very earliest period of instruction
should use the power the child has for obser-
vation and work. These capacities should be
made the means of his education, the standard
for using his own observation. If the power
of observation is vigorous, no general rules
are to be drawn, but only particular ones.
One child must read, play, or do handwork
in a different degree to another. One can
at an early age, the other only at a later
period, take advantage of the education to
be obtained from going to museums or from
travel (the best of all travel is tramping).
The indispensable elements will be reduced to
their lowest measure; for what any one man
needs to be able to do, in order to find himself
at home in life, is not considerable. The
minimum is to read well, to spell properly, to
write with both hands, to copy simple objects,
so that one learns picture writing just as alpha-
bet writing. This skill is quite different from
artistic gifts. Besides there must be instruc-
tion in looking at things geometrically, the
four simple rules of arithmetic and decimal
fractions, as much geography as will help one
to use a map and a time-table, as much know-
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The School of the Future 259
ledge of nature as will give one a fundamental
conception of the simplest requirements of
hygiene; and finally, the English language, in
order to put one in touch with the increasing
intercourse in the great world. Through these
requirements the child will be endowed with
what he needs, in order to find himself at home
in the world of books and of life. Let there
be added to these the abihty to darn a stock-
ing, sew on a button, and thread a needle.
Only the indispensable should be the obli-
gatory foundation of further culture, which
is only the trimming on a simple garment.
The trimming receives its entire value because
the individual has prepared it himself; it must
not be made by a machine according to a
model prepared in a factory.
What is mentioned here supplies the same
basis for all, but children should be able to
throw themselves into the pastoral life of the
Old Testament, into the life of the Greek and
Scandinavian gods and heroes, into the life
of popular legends and national history; but
this should be done only through the books
which they get for their amusement. At the
present time all of these things are made pure
subjects of study!
Assume, then, that this foundation is laid.
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The school of the future, which will be a school
for all, will advance general education, but
the plan it follows will be adapted to every
individual. In the school of my dreams
there will be no report books, no rewards, no
examinations; at graduation time examina-
tions will be arranged for but they will be oral.
In them detailed knowledge will not be con-
sidered; education as a whole will determine
the decision of the examiners, who will per-
sonally accompany the children in the open
air in order to become quietly acquainted with
what they know of mankind, of past and
present history.
And the education which will make the
training aim at this end will be diametrically
opposed to that given by the teacher of the
present day. The teacher will be required to
make his own observations, he will guide the
scholar in the choice of books, and show him
how to work. But he will not give first his
own observation, judgment, and knowledge in
the form of lectures, preparations, and ex-
periments. Occasionally he will without giv-
ing notice ask for an oral or written account
of work, and so ascertain how thoroughly the
scholar has gone into the subject. At another
time, when he knows that the scholar is pre-
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The School of the Future 261
pared for it, he will give a general treatment,
a comprehensive review of the suhject, a stim-
ulating and stirring impression, as a reward
for independent work. Finally, when the
scholar wishes it, he will examine him formally,
but his real work will be to teach the scholar
to make his own observations, to solve his own
problems, to find his own aids to study in
books, dictionaries, maps, etc., to fight his way
through his own difficulties to victory and so
reach the only moral reward for his trouble
with broadened insight and increased strength.
The scholar who sits down and listens to,
or looks at, the demonstration or experiment
of the teacher does not learn to observe, nor
does he whose exercise book is corrected with
painful accuracy learn to write; nor does the
one who pedantically carries out the system
of models in the sloyd system learn to make
articles fit for every-day use. The student
must make his investigations himself, he must
find the mistakes himself when their presence
is indicated to him, he must himself think out
the objects brought before him. Above all,
the separate errors must not be corrected ex-
cept when they are so constant and serious
that they waste time. But the scholar him-
self must try to find out the correct and com-
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262 The Century of the Child
plete method of work and of expression.
This is what training, what education is.
Text-books will be attractive and virile, the
" Reader " will disappear, the complete books
in the original (the text may be revised if it
is filled with confusing details) will be placed
in the hands of children. The school library
will be the largest, most beautiful, and im-
portant room; lending books in the schools
will be an essential part of the curriculum.
The future school of my dreams will be sur-
rounded by large gardens, where, as in already-
existing schools in some places, the feeling
for beauty will be directly encouraged. The
individual scholars will arrange the flowers in
the school and at home. They will take them
home in order to adorn the window garden,
and every schoolroom in winter will have a
garden of this kind. This will be the natural
method of making the simplest of all esthetic
enjoyments a imiversal need. But taste
must not be developed by instruction in the
art of arranging flowers; this is to be attained
only by pointing out those that have been ar-
ranged in the most beautiful way. In this
as in all other things, self-help is essential.
Natural dexterity will be attained by book-
binding, turning, and other kinds of
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The School of the Future 263
handwork, also by gardening and play. Such
training has far greater educational value
than the systematic types. The purposeless-
ness and the uniformity of these are the ter-
ror of youth. ' Gymnastics should only be
used on days when the weather makes
bodily exercise in the open air impossible;
they can certainly be made more living by be-
ing connected with physiology and hygiene,
just as mathematics can be made real by being
combined with handwork and drawing. But
nothing can equal the value of movement in
the open air.
Besides its garden, the future school will
have its hall. Outside it will have a play-
ground for dancing and really free play — I
mean the kind of play where children, after
they have learnt the game, are left to them-
selves. Games constantly accompanied by a
teacher make play a parody.
The development of beauty will become the
aim of physical instruction as it once was with
the Greeks, not simply physical strength.
Through different kinds of hand and garden
work, the child will be spared from a number
of requirements in mathematics and physics,
because he will in many things make dis-
coveries himself. In the methods of school
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264 The Century of the Child
drudgery the child learns that a seed grows
by warmth and moisture. In real training,
the child himself sows the seed and sees what
happens to it; this system is followed I believe
in many schools, but only as proofs of a given
abstract statement. The mistake of the mod-
em school is really just here; it illustrates its
course of instruction by, as it were, over-
charging the child's attention, instead of giv-
ing him time and opportunity to originate
for himself.
In the future school-building, there will be
no class-rooms at all, but different halls with
ample material provided for different subjects,
and, by the side of them, rooms for work where
each scholar will have a place assigned to him
for private study. Common examinations
will only take place when several scholars are
ready and willing, anxious to be examined on
the same subject; and each student can ask
for the examination independent of the rest.
In every room, on the outside of the build-
ing, architecture and decoration will form a
beautiful whole; and the artistic objects, de-
tached from the building, for the adornment
of the school will be partly originals, partly
casts and copies of famous originals.
The sense for art will not be awakened by
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The School of the Future 265
direct artistic instruction, either in the school
or when visiting museums. Classes can per-
haps get such knowledge when taken around
museums; but love for art can only be gained
when the scholar is surrounded by art; when
he can absorb it in peace and freedom. Let
this quiet progress be anticipated by instruc-
tion — I don't mean the admiring criticism of
the teacher himself, which he in passing ex-
presses without explanation or questioning —
and the inevitable result is troubling the water
of a living well. Interference here, as in all
other cases, destroys the individual pleasure
of discovery. Constantly being taken about
really impairs the capacity for seeing for one-
self. In art, in literature, and in religion, all
instruction is a mistake until the young mind
has chosen some part of it as an object to be
known. Knowledge destroys, feeling creates,
life. But the roots of feeling are easily
injured.
As to visits to museums under the direction
of a teacher, they are only of use when the
scholar has previously made, on his own ac-
coimt, his own discoveries. To these he should
be stimulated by the teacher. When occu-
pied in the study of Greek history, he will be
asked for a description of Greek sculpture
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266 The Century of the Child
that is to be found in such and such a museum.
When lectures are given on the Dutch War
of Independence, Dutch pictures will be de-
scribed. Only after the scholar has used his
own eyes, and formed his own judgments,
will a synthesis of his experiences under ex-
ternal guidance be of use. The same holds
good of natural-history, historical, and ethno-
graphical museums. Taking children around
in herds produces very slight results unless
they have been put in the way of noticing
things by themselves.
Among the books of the school, the best lit-
erature in the original and in good accessible
translations should be found. Works should
be at hand capable of giving aid to those who
have artistic interests. There is no greater
fault in modem education than the care spent
in selecting books for different ages. This is
essentially an individual matter, and can only
be decided by the choice of the child himself.
A general crusade against all children's books,
and freedom for the young to read great liter-
ature, is essential to the sound development of
the modem child. What is too old for him
may be set aside according to the taste of the
child himself. Suppose at the age of ten
years, the child is absorbed in Faust (I know
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The School of the Future 267
such cases) ; the child then gets at this age an
impression for life that does not prevent him
receiving from the same poem another im-
pression at twenty years, or again another at
thirty or forty years. The so-called dangers
in standard literature are, for the child, almost
nil. Incidents that excite adults, his calm feel-
ings pass over entirely. And even if children
reach the emotional period of youth, only
rarely does the plain downright expression of
a great mind about natural things stain the
imagination, falsify reality, and spoil taste.
It is the modern romance, women's novels,
just as much as French novels, that do this.
Children cannot in these days, even if par-
ents are unreasonable enough to wish it, be
kept in ignorance. Crude or stolen impurity
gets a greater power over a mind that has not
absorbed respect for the absolute seriousness
of natural processes. This reverence is sure
to come from education, and through the im-
pressions of standard literature and first-class
art.
Veiling this subject is apt to lead astray and
to vulgarise. To those who can be harmed
in this way the Bible is as suggestive as any
of the crudities of modem literature. In the
temperament which quietly accepts natural
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268 The Century of the Child
things as a matter of course, is laid the founda-
tion of real purity, and only through real pur-
ity can life, Uke art and literature, become
great and sound.
In the works of great minds, one meets an
infinite world in which the erotic element is
only one factor. This gives them great re-
pose. Moreover imagination must have
nourishment outside of itself; otherwise it will
live upon its own product. Its nourishment
should be what is most readable. The child's
mind should be first fed on legends and then
on great literatiu*e. This should be all the
more insisted on because great literature of-
ten remains unread, when modern literature
in its varied types begins later on to be
absorbing.
To be able to use one's eyes in the worlds of
nature, man, and art, to be able to read good
things — ^these are the two great ends to which
home and school education should direct their
course. If the child has these capacities, he
can learn almost everything else himself. I may
remark in passing, that a sound development
of the imagination has not only an aesthetic
but an ethical significance. It is really the
foundation for active sympathy all round.
Numerous cruelties are committed now by
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The School of the Future 269
people who have not sufficient imagination to
see how their acts affect others.
In my dreamed-of school, founded along
these lines, there is perfect freedom in selecting
subjects. The school offers the subjects, but
it forces no one to take them. English, Ger-
man, French, natural science, mathematics,
history, and geography are taught. The
mother tongue is practiced fluently in speak-
ing, reading, and writing. But in this case
grammar is superfluous both for general edu-
cation and for using a language; it belongs to
scientiflc study, not to general culture.
Grammar should be applied in the case of
foreign languages, only so far as it is abso-
lutely necessary to appreciate the literature.
This is the sole aim general culture has in view.
Those who wish to speak the languages flu-
ently, and write them correctly, must attain
facility by continual study. Those who have
mastered the literature very easily learn the
rest. Those who are familiar with the litera-
ture of a foreign language, write it, even with
the mistakes they make, better than the per-
son who has put together a perfectly correct
composition according to grammatical rules.
After the child, in his language study, has
made enough progress to understand a fairly
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270 The Century of the Child
easy book, he ought to work through one
book after another, with the help of a diction-
ary and explain in his own language ex-
tempore what he reads. In this way is laid
the foundation of a knowledge of literature,
not the ready-made opinions of the histories
of literature. Both in their own and in for-
eign literatures, the young must be lead to
reality, not, as now, to its copy; to the sea, not
to the water pipe. While the teacher is di-
recting the study of language, he should try
at the same time to help the scholar to a definite
choice of books, and his choice should if pos-
sible be brought into relation with other sub-
jects. So he will reconmiend literature
connected with historical, scientific, or geogra-
phical study. Afterwards he will give a gen-
eral analysis, and will read a passage aloud, or
will encourage the scholar to read some fav-
orite poem. But all poetry mongering — ^such
as hacking a poem to pieces by divisions into
strophies and sections — is to be forbidden.
Since childhood is the best time for securing
the fanuliar use of languages, after parents
and teachers agree which scholars shall take
up languages, children so selected will study
English and French, each for two years suc-
cessively, then let them have two years of G^er-
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The School of the Future 271
man, or reverse this arrangement. In this
way a language will always be studied with
other subjects, never three languages to-
gether. It is really only possible to take in a
language, as a possession to be kept through
the future, and never lost, by giving to it
alone two years of really thorough study.
Scholars who want to continue their draw-
ing or learn any kind of handwork, can com-
bine it with the study of the main subjects.
Chorus singing should be practised every day
for the whole year, indoors and in the open
air. It should be treated as a means of ex-
pressing the feelings, not as an introduction
for developing musical capacities, though for
that matter singing can give a lead to the dis-
covery of musical talent.
As to the four principle subjects, history,
geography, natural science, and mathematics,
they should not be studied at the same time.
The shallow multiplicity of the present system
is a burden to all; it works like the "water
torture" on talented individuals. It wears
out their desire to learn, their initiative, their
individuality, their joy of living. Those im-
der this torture never get a breathing spell,
are never able to do thorough work, and so
become superficial.
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272 The Century of the Child
In my ideal school, mathematics will be
learnt in winter, as it is suitable for the cold
and clear winter air. In spring and in au-
timm, nature, out of doors, in nature itself, will
be studied, not each department of nature as
a special subject. An insight into geology,
botany, and the animal world will be attained
in their close natural union. The scholar will
leam separate objects through the actual ob-
servation of life. In the text-book of life they
will gain in its broad outlines a combined
sketch of what they have acquired through
intellectual processes. On rainy days they
will construct for themselves in writing and
in drawing a general sketch of what they have
seen. General culture does not mean know-
ing the number of stamens or the number of
articulations of a hundred flowers or skele-
tons. What educates and acts on the feelings
and imagination, on thought and character,
too, for that matter, is observing and combin-
ing natural phenomena; the ability to follow
the laws of life and development in the natu-
ral world about us. The last member in the
scheme of development is man. So the study
of man from the standpoint of physiology and
hygiene, should come last; consideration for
the psychology of the child, urges too, that
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The School of the Future 273
the foundation for the knowledge of organic
nature, physics, and chemistry, should complete
the educational structure.
As in natural sciences we are beginning to
give up false methods, and make the student
return to the same subject, with a broader
point of view, in the same way the child should
at certain periods devote his attention to his-
tory and geography, and then leave them en-
tirely alone. The endless circle, the drudgery,
the repetitions, all looking to examinations as
the end, will with the examinations be abol-
ished. It is a matter of experience that the
small details of all subjects slip from the mem-
ory two months after examinations. Most
educated men have no recollection of the de-
tailed knowledge they acquired in school,
while the general impressions of that period
still influence soul, heart, character, and will.
This experience will be used, not as is done
now, simply recognised as a conmion one.
In my school the scholar interested in history
will apply himself to it in the winter months;
will read works about it, while others are de-
voting themselves to mathematics or geogra-
phy. In spring these two classes of students
can share in the excursions without active par-
ticipation in the studies, while those who are
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inclined to natural science will draw, make
collections, and use the microscope. One
group can by studying geography bring
themselves into contact with the life of nature
and the Ufe of man. So they will be led next
year to study history in winter and to take
part in science study during the spring and
autumn. All these diflferent combinations are
to be thought out by parents, teachers, and
scholars; they can only be indicated here.
The final principle is that only two subjects
can be studied at the same time. After the
scholar has acquired from these all the educa-
tion he can absorb at this stage, these subjects
will be dismissed and taken up again by those
who wish to specialise in one direction or the
other. Instead of the separation of subjects
that divides interest and strength in our pre-
sent schools, in the new ones the chief aim wiU
be concentration. In history, the space de-
voted to work will be limited to the amount
demanded by present-day culture. History
will then be the only subject suitable for
general intellectual training, — ^the history of
man's development. It will bring out the
great principles of ethnography and sociology,
of political economy, the lives of great men,
the history of the church, art, and literature.
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The School of the Future 275
In scientific study and in teaching mathe-
matics, the men prominent in science and in
discovery will find a place. Geography
brings up points of view related to almost
every study, and experience already acquired
gives good reason for making this subject the
centre of all instruction.
What are the results of the present-day
school? Exhausted brain power, weak nerves,
limited originality, paralysed initiative, dulled
power of observing surrounding facts, ideal-
ism blunted under the feverish zeal of getting
a position in the class — ^a wild chase in which
parents and children regard the loss of a year
as a great misfortune. After the examina-
tions have been passed and the year gone by,
the best students realise the need of beginning
their studies in a living way at almost every
point. The majority of students are unable
to read even a paper with any real profit, and
those who are given a book in a foreign lan-
guage to which they have devoted innumerable
hours, very seldom understand it completely,
unless the language instruction of the school
has been supplemented at home. The inca-
pacity to observe for one's self, to get at the
bottom of what is observed and reflect upon
it, is constantly more remarkable, as a result
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276 The Century of the Child
of the preparation system at school, even when
this is aided by the mothers hearing lessons at
home. The late Professor Key said that it was
his experience, as teacher in a medical institu-
tion, that scholars in school were incapable of
seeing, thinking, or working. I have heard
the same observation made in Stockholm
lately in a government oflSce, that the young
men were incapable of taking up practical
duties in which they should have shown the
knowledge they were supposed to have after
the fine examination they had passed. The
system then does not serve even secondary
ends; to all the higher aims of hmnan existence
it is directly opposed.
In the course of a hundred years or so, ex-
perience of this sort will cause the downfall
of the system. Then, perhaps, these dreamed-
of schools will arise. In them, the youth will
learn first of all to observe and to love life,
and their own powers will be consciously cul-
tivated as the highest values in life. By mix-
ing children of all classes together, the upper
class, provided it still exists, will get that
" colouring of earnest character which it now
lacks," as Almquist said long ago; the lower
classes will get the polish, that general culti-
vation they now lack. Through these schools.
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The School of the Future 277
where common training is given to all, the
natural circulation between all classes will be
furthered. The aristocrat's son and the work-
ingman's son will change places, if nature has
made the first adapted for the position of the
second, and vice versa. Through these schools
the country child will always be able to grow
up in the country, and need not be sent for
educational purposes into the city, provided
there are still great cities. Finally boys and
girls will enjoy in them all the advantages of
co-education, without the particular capacities
of each being forced into the uniformity of a
conmion examination system.
After the children all over the country have
been educated to about fifteen years of age, in
such real common schools, some working more
with the brain, others with their hands, the ap-
plication schools will begin — schools for clas-
sical studies, for exact, for social or aesthetic
sciences; for handicrafts and handwork; for
diflferent professions and state positions;
schools with diflferent principles and methods,
schools which can produce manifold diflfering
forms of training and individuality. Educa-
tion then, instead of being as now, the creator
of servile souls, the devotees of formalism, or
of characters who hate all forms in a spirit of
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278 The Century of the Child
revolt, will bring fresh personal powers to
intellectual and material culture alike, to the
sciences and the inventive faculties, to artistic
talent and to the whole art of life. It will
awaken and encourage capacity to find out
new scientific methods, to think youthful
thoughts, to make clever discoveries. Edu-
cated human beings will apply to the whole
sphere of culture their experience in their own
experiments, their own activity, their own
eflforts; for all of which the school and the
home will have already laid the foundation.
In the school, the painful restlessness of the
present "to get somewhere'* will disappear
entirely. In the calm, profound atmosphere
of my school, the young generation will
be trained to believe that the most important
thing for man is not to do something, but to
be something. It may be harsh to say that
conmion natiu*es are reckoned by what they
do, noble natures by what they are; yet
it is a deep truth, forgotten in this century
of activity, in this age of woman. But it is
bound to be remembered in the century of con-
templation, in the century of the child.
These principles will be applied, too, per-
haps, in the field of practical work. Machines
and electricity accomplish work that can give
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The School of the Future 279
no creative enjoyment; handwork will be again
a portion of man's happiness; we shall live
through a second Renaissance, the renewal of
the personal joy which the man of earlier
times experienced when the artistic moulding,
when the rich, coloured tapestry, the beautiful
piece of carving came from his own hand.
The present school system leads to the fabri-
cation of unnecessary articles by the dozen.
It does not lead to a true love and appreciation
of professional work, that love and apprecia-
tion from which, in the great period of art,
artistic production organically arose.
The present system, in all fields of study,
limits the natural capacity of the child in the
concentration, the combination, and develop-
ment of its powers. When it produces its
best results, it turns children at the close of
their school years into pocket encyclopedias,
representing humanity's progress and know-
ledge. Only when such results as these cease
to be called a harmonious development, will it
be conceded that the school can and should
have no other meaning than to give the child a
preparation for continuing, through his whole
life, the work of training and education. Only
then will the school become a place where in-
dividuals get learning to last a lifetime, not
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as now, even when the hest face is put upon
it — ^where they are impoverished for Ufe.
Through the victory of these convictions alone
will each individual get his rights at school;
both the person who does not want to study,
as well as the one who does. Consideration
will be given to the individual who has to have
books as means of training and to the other
case where the activity of the eye and hand is
required as a means to the same end. It will
be a place for the person with practical talent
and for the theorist, for the realist as well as
for the idealist. Both classes can freely do
what they can do best; the members of each
class will often feel tempted to test their pow-
ers by doing what the other class is able to do.
One-sidedness will be corrected naturally, not,
as it is now, mercilessly flattened out through
the steam-roller methods of the " harmonious
ideal of training."
To supply workers in these future schools,
new normal schools must be provided.
Patented pedagogy will give place to a type
of teaching which considers the individual.
Only the person who naturally or by training
can play with children, live with children, learn
from children, is fond of children, will be
placed in the school to develop there for him-
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The School of the Future 281
self his individual methods. Positions will be
given only after a year's trial. When this
period is passed the teachers will not be
tested by the examiner alone, one who has fol-
lowed the instruction given by them during
the year, but the children themselves will also
be heard from on this question. Of course, no
absolute value can be assigned to the judg-
ment of children, but nevertheless it has a really
great importance. The instinct of the child
chooses with astonishing accuracy what is first-
class. But what, in the case of the child, has
this character? This question has been an-
swered by Goethe, " The greatest fortune of
the earth's children is personaUty alone."
At the present time objectivity in instruc-
tion is exalted, but every great educator has
achieved success by being entirely subjective.
The teacher should be a lover of truth. There-
fore he should never force a resisting object to
serve his own views. As a result of this at-
titude, the more subjective he is, the better.
The fuller and richer he conmiunicates to the
children the essence and power of his own
view of hf e and his own character, so much the
more will he forward their real development,
provided, however, that he does not force upon
them his opinions with the claim of inf allibiUtyo
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282 The Century of the Child
In this as in all other matters, the young
should be allowed to exercise free choice.
The teachers of both sexes in my school will
have short hours of work, a long time to rest,
and a large salary; that is, they will have the
possibility of a continuous development. The
limit of their service will be twenty years.
After this period, they will become members
of a school jury composed of parents and teach-
ers, or they will asisst in final examinations,
as censors. These will be conducted as in-
dicated above, in such a way that each cen-
sor shall pass a summer either at home or
abroad, in company with young people, not
more than five in nmnber. By living with
them the censor will be able to measure their
capacity for absorbing an education; he can
direct them in the choice of a profession. By a
" Socratic " commimication of practical wis-
dom, he will supply a substitute for the Con-
firmation Instruction which will no longer be
given. The psychological value of this instruc-
tion is not to be actually found in what one
learns from it, but in the direction of the mind
to the serious questions and pursuits of life, in
the awakening of ethical self -development,
which is the factor of supreme importance in
passing from childhood to youth. In this wajr
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The School of the Future 283
the young will be mitiated into the art of life.
I mean by this the art of making one's own
personality, one's own existence, an object of
artistic interest and pursuit. The initiation
will be conducted by a wise man, or by a
woman who has kept her youthfuhiess, so that
she imderstands the joys and pains of the
young, their play and their seriousness, their
dreams and aspirations, their faults and their
dangers — ^leaders who can give indirect sug-
gestions how young people should play their
own melodies in the orchestra of life.
My school will not come into existence while
governments make their greatest sacrifices
for militarism. Only when this tendency is
overcome, a point in development will be
reached, where one can see that the dearest
school programme is also the cheapest. Peo-
ple will realise that strong manly brains and
heart have the greatest social value. I have
already said that this is no reform plan for the
present that I am outlining here, only a dream
for the future. But in our wonderful exist-
ence dreams are becoming at last actual
realities.^
^ Since I wrote the above, there have been f oimded in
England, France, also in Norway, reformed schools, work-
ing more or less in the direction I have outlined.
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CHAPTER VII
RELIGIOUS INSTEUCTION
At the present moment the most demoralis-
ing factor in education is Christian reKgious
instruction. What I mean by this is princi-
pally catechism. Scripture history, theology,
and church history. Even earnest Christians
have said, regarding the ordinary instruction
in these subjects, that nothing shows better
how deeply religion is rooted in man's nature
than the fact that " religious education '' is not
able to destroy religion.
But beside this, I believe that even a more
living, a more actual instruction in Christian-
ity injures the child. Children should bring
themselves by themselves to live in the
patriarchal world of the Old Testament; in-
deed, in the world of the New Testament as
well. This can be done best in the form of
children's Bibles. These works will be treas-
ured by children; they will find in them infinite
material for nourishing the imagination and
the emotions. But this can only be done by
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Religious Instruction 285
allowing children to read the Bible undis-
turbed, without the need of pedagogical or
dogmatic explanation. At home this book, like
other children's books, should be only talked
about and explained when the child requests it.
It should never be treated as a school book or
appear on the school desk. If the child gets
impressions in this way from the Bible, freed
from all other authority, apart from the sub-
jective one of the impressions themselves, the
myths of the Bible will no more contradict the
rest of his instruction, than the Scandinavian
story of creation or the Greek legends of the
gods.
But the most dangerous of all educational
mistakes in influencing humanity, is due to the
fact, that children are now taught the Old
Testament account of the world as absolute
truth, although it wholly contradicts their phy-
sical and historical instruction. Besides child-
ren learn to regard the morality of the New
Testament as absolutely binding, while its
commands are everywhere seen to be trans-
gressed by the child, the moment he takes his
first step into life. Our whole industrial and
capitalistic society rests on a contradiction of
the Christian conmiand to love one's neigh-
bour as one's self. The capitalistic axiom is
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that every man is nearest neighbour to him-
self.
The eyes of children are here and in similar
cases, clear-sighted in their simplicity. At a
tender age they are able to observe whether
their surroundings are in living accord with
Christian teaching. From a four-year-old
child, with whom I was talking about Jesus'
commandment to love one another, I received
the reply, " If Jesus really said so. Papa is no
Christian." Before long the child gets into
conflict with his instructors and with the com-
mands of Christianity. A small child in a
Swedish city took the word of Jesus about
charity to heart. Not only his playthings, but
his clothes he gave to the poor; his parents
cured, by corporal punishment, this practical
type of Christianity. A teacher who was im-
pressing on a small girl in a Finnish city the
commandment to love one's enemies, received
as an answer that this was impossible, for no
one in Finland could love Bobrikoff.
I know the sophism used in both cases to
overcome the invulnerable logic of the child;
but I also know how these sophisms make hy-
pocrisy so natural among Christians, that it
is now imconscious. It would take a new
Kirkegaard to shake up our consciences.
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Religious Instruction 287
Everywhere Rousseau's words hold true,
" The child gets high principles to direct him,
but he is forced by his surroundings to act
according to petty principles, every time he
wishes to put the high ones into practice. He
goes on to say people have innumerable " ifs "
and "buts," by which the child has to learn
that great principles are only words, that the
reality of life is something quite different.
The dangerous thing is not that the ideal
of Christianity is high; it comes from the fact
that every ideal in its essence is imattainable.
The nearer we get to it the more lofty it is.
This is the characteristic of every ideal. But
the demoralising feature in Christianity as an
ideal is, that it is presented as absolute, while
man as a social being is obliged to transgress
it every day. Besides he is taught in his re-
ligious instruction, that as a fallen being he
cannot in any case attain the ideal, although
the only possibility of his living righteously in
temporal things, and happily in the world to
come, depends on his capacity for realising it.
In this net of unsolvable contradictions,
generation after generation has seen its ideal
of belief obscured. Gradually each new gen-
eration has learned not to take its new ideal
seriously. As to the cowardly or braggart
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concessions to the idiocies of fashion, and the
follies by which people are ruined in order to
live according to their position, among other
psychological grounds for man's lack of steadi-
ness must be placed, as its ultimate cause, the
following: The child, along with religion, has
breathed in the conviction that opinions are
one thing, actions another. This experience
goes through the whole of life, even in the case
of those who have lost the conviction that the
Christian religion is absolute. The free-
thinker is married, has his children baptised,
and allows them to be confirmed, without con-
sidering whether he is forced to it by his own
wish, or the wish of doing like other people.
The republican sings the royal hymn, sends
loyal salutations by telegraph, accepts decora-
tions, — ^but I must break oflF, otherwise I
should have to enumerate all the small acts of
insincerity to one's self, of which the daily life
of most people consists, and which are de-
fended under the name of non-essentials; I
could never get to the end. This is not the
way the Christian martyrs thought who might
have freed themselves from death by casting
a few grains of incense on the emperor's altar.
Two grains of incense, — ^what an unimportant
matter, thinks the modem man, and with quiet
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Religious Instruction 289
conscience he daily sacrifices to many gods in
whom he does not believe.
How illogical Protestantism is too, and yet
for so long it possessed a spiritually educat-
ive power, while its dualism was unsuspected,
while one with full sincerity gave to holiday
and work day its due share. But now that
a new Protestantism is come to life within the
fold of Protestantism, this method of speaking
in two voices is deeply demoralising.
Piece by piece has been torn down that sys-
tem of teaching which the Catholic church
built up, so wonderfully adapted to the psy-
chological needs of the majority of people.
It formed its fimdamental creeds, just as
they still remain, on the deepest experiences of
mankind. But Protestantism is ever looking
back from the results of its own handiwork.
In home, in the school, in the high school,
during military service, in office work, every-
where passive dependence is insisted on under
the name of discipline, discretion, faithfulness
to duty. And like all the fine words, by which
the living souls of men are turned into the
slaves of discipline, these terms exalt esprit
de corps, and pass over really serious faults.
Discipline means subordinating one's self to
every crude force. Only when all Protestants
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really become actual Protestants, and refuse
to receive the greatest good of life, their re-
ligion, through authority, will they begin even
in social and political questions to attain an
independent opinion of their own. As teach-
ers and leaders, they will secure for school
children, and for students, for officers and for
officials, the freedom in word and deed that is
the right of the citizen and the man. Men
and women, who in their private life are
strictly honourable, have learnt, in general
questions, to put their thoughts, their acts, un-
der the conmiand of a leader, and above all
they have learnt to do this in the name of re-
ligious belief.
The courage to construct one's own opinion
in everything that makes the essential worth
of life, but chiefly in one's religious belief, the
power to express it, the will of making some
sacrifice for it, all these give man a new share
of civilisation and culture. As long as educa-
tion and social life do not consciously forward
this kind of courage, power, and will, the world
will remain as it is, a parade ground of stu-
pidity, crudeness, force, and selfishness, no
matter whether radicals or conservatives, the
democratic or aristocratic elements, have the
upper hand.
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Religious Instruction 291
The most demoralising of all principles of
belief was the discouraging teaching that hu-
man nature was fallen and incapable of reach-
ing holiness by its own eflfort — ^the teaching
that one could only come through grace and
forgiveness of sins into a proper relation with
temporal and eternal things. For those be-
low the ordinary level, this position of grace
produced spiritual stagnation, not to speak of
the business people, who daily allowed the
blood of Jesus to wipe out their day's debit in
the score of morality. Only those who were
naturally superior increased in holiness on
being convinced that they were children of
God in Christ. Mankind, on the whole,
showed the deep demoralisation of a double
morality. This dualism commenced as soon
as the first Christians ceased to expect the
return of Jesus, — ^an expectation which
brought their life into real unity with his
teaching. But this double morality has for
nineteen hundred years retained man's soul
and the social order in practical heathenism.
Although some pure and great spirits really
received aid from Christianity in their longings
for infinity, and although in the Middle Ages
many strong hearts tried seriously to realise
its teaching, yet the majority of mankind lived
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292 The Century of the Child
and lives still in wavering irresolution. This
is the result of having no place to anchor to
while the citizens of antiquity had an ethic,
which could be translated into reality and
could turn them into sincere, steadfast
personalities.
Since nineteen hundred years have proved
that there is no possibility, in a humanly con-
structed society, of living according to the
teaching of Jesus, as a practical, infallible rule
of holiness, man can escape this immoral du-
plicity only in one way: the way already
travelled over by many separate individuals,
who with Prometheus cry out, "Hast thou
not, thyself, completed all, O holy glowing
heart 1'' In other words, these individuals
have become convinced that Christianity is the
product of humanity. Just as little as any
other product of humanity does it exhaust ab-
solute and eternal truth.
When men cease to teach their children be-
lief in an eternal providence, without whose
will no sparrow f aUs from the roof, they will
be able, instead of this, to imprint on the minds
of children the new religious conception of the
divinity of a world, proceeding according to
law. The new morality will be built on this
new religious idea. It will be filled with
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Religious Instruction 293
reverence for the absolute conjunction of
cause and effect — a connection which no grace
can remove, Man's actions will really be di-
rected by this certainty. He will not rock
himself to sleep in any sort of hope, based
on providence or a reconciliation, able to de-
fer surely fixed effects. This new morality,
strengthened by the realities of life, admits of
logical consequences. No single command of
this teaching needs to remain an empty phrase-
In its system, too, there will be a place to ap-
ply all the eternal prof oimd words uttered by
Jesus or by other great human souls. These
words will ever furnish further material for
apphcation, which is the same as saying ma-
terial for self -application. Yet the applica-
tion will be worked out in complete freedom.
Each word will be used as furnishing the
material just suited to that style which men
wish to apply to the architecture of their per-
sonality. Yet neither the words nor the ex-
amples of one or the other teacher will be
taught as absolutely binding.
The soul of the child will not be stained by
tears of repentance for sins nor by the fear of
hell. It will not be stained by a reaUsm
without ideas and without ideals, by the con-
temptuous mistrust, which the mouldering
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294 The Century of the Child
eflfects of fine words leave behind, like cold
damp spots. The weak, as well as the strong,
will progress in the happy and responsible be-
lief in their own personality, as their only
source of help. The pulse of their purpose
will be strong and warm with red blood. They
will not be forced to humility; they will not
accept even equality with all others, or with
any other one. On the contrary they will be
strengthened in their right, to give their own
individual stamp to their joys, their suflFer-
ings, and their works. They will be warned
to do their best because it is their own; to
seek their highest good, by drawing their own
boimdaries at the place where the rights of
others begm.
While the home and the school make com-
promises between two opposed views of life,
people obtain from neither of them any real
good for the education of children. I have
already shown how in one and the same school
religious instruction and a certain amount of
knowledge and love for nature as well as his-
tory can be communicated. In one and the
same school the course of natural development
and history can be taught in connection with
instruction in religious history. In this in-
struction Judaism and Christianity will re-
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Religious Instruction 295
ceive the first place. So the reverence and
love children were wont to acquire for the
personality and morality of Jesus, previously
obtained in the Bible, can be increased. Guided
by sincere and serious purposes one can select
either plan. But, during religious instruc-
tion, to make Moses and Christ the absolute
teachers of truth, and in the hours devoted to
natural history, to expound Darwinism, cause
more than anything else that want of logic,
that moral laxity and flaccidity that can effect
nothing and want nothing. Everything I
have learnt, since these words were written,
has strengthened a himdred fold my previous
convictions that the most essential thing is
not, what kind of view of life we have — ^this
may be important enough too — ^but that we
have enough capacity of faith to appropriate
for ourselves some view of life, enough force
to bring it to reality in life. But nothing
works more depressingly on the ethical energy
of growing generations than the dualistic view
of life, received at the present time at school.
The school too must exercise its choice; there
must be no compromise between two schemes
of education and two views of life, if the
strength of will and the power of faith in
young people is not to be broken. The ques-
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296 The Century of the Child
tion of a compromise is in this case not a ques-
tion of application; it is a most important
question of principle in education.
Since I set down these words, many points
of view have heen brought out in this connec-
tion. One which made a sensation when it
was published, in 1890, was Professor DodeFs
book, Moses or Darwin? The author showed
how deeply Darwinism was implanted in
science and in civilisation; how popular educa-
tion was restricted, because it was kept remote
from the scientific views of the present day
and forced into the circle of ecclesiastical
ideas. Religious instruction is simply a
crime against the psychological law of devel-
opment. For children are taught by a the-
ological system to think about abstract
conceptions, while they are in no condition to
do it. The worst is, he said, that in high
schools the theory of development is now
taught as scientific truth, while in the common
schools, built and maintained by the same
government, the myth of the Mosaic story of
creation continues to be taught, in the sharp-
est contrast with what science and living nature
teach the child. This is an immoral and dis-
honest state of affairs that must be brought to
an end.
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Religious Instruction 297
It is my deepest conviction that man, with-
out religion in the emotional element of his
nature, can pursue no ideal ends, cannot see
beyond his own personal interest, cannot
realise great purposes, cannot be ready to sac-
rifice himself. Religious enthusiasm broad-
ens our soul, binds us to the acts we hold as
ideals. But because Christianity weighs upon
the soul and can no longer be the connecting
link of all factors in our conduct, earnest men
are abandoning it more and more, ipfluenced
by purely religious reasons. Such men should
not have their children brought up as Chris-
tians, under the excuse that the child requires
Christianity. Here, as in other cases, in
which adults are not agreed about what the
child needs, we should try to get, not from
adults but from children themselves, some in-
formation about their real needs. In this way
we can learn that the child himself begins at
a very early period to be concerned with the
eternal riddles of mankind, to be troubled with
the questions of whence and whither. At the
same time one discovers that the sincere and
honest childish nature is opposed to the Chris-
tian explanation of the world, until the child's
sincerity is dulled and he either takes without
question what is taught, or in his own soul
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298 The Century of the Child
denies what his lips must repeat, or finally
allows his heart to be possessed by the only
nourishment offered to his religious needs.
My own recollections of childhood caused
me to make observations of the religious ideas
of children at an early period. I have now
before me comprehensive accounts of this in-
vestigation, going back twenty-five years. I
recollect my own fierce hate against God,
when I, at the age of six years, heard of the
death of Jesus being caused by God's demand
for an atonement, and at ten years I recall my
denial of God's providence, when a young
workman died far away from his wife and his
five children, to whom his existence was so
necessary. My brooding about the existence
of God took on this occasion the form of a
challenge. I wrote in the sand, " God is
dead." In doing so I thought. If there is a
God, he will kill me now with a thunderbolt.
But since the sim continued to shine, the ques-
tion was answered for the time being; but it
soon turned up again. I had no other reli-
gious instruction than reading the Bible on
Sunday, preaching on Sunday, and reading
from the catechism, which, by the way, was
never explained. Yet the New Testament be-
longed to my play books; I learnt in it to love
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Religious Instruction 299
Jesus as profoundly as other great personalities
of whom I read. But during the confirmation
period, I received explanations of the Bible;
in them every point, every name in the Gospel
was explained, every sentence made the basis
of hair-splitting distinctions, to show the ful-
filment of prophecies and the edifying hidden
meaning of every word, that formerly seemed
so simple. The dogma of the Trinity for ex-
ample was shown to be contained in the second
verse of Genesis. This was a terribly sad dis-
covery for me, that the living book of my
childish heart and my childish imagination
could be so stone dead. That religious indif-
ference is a frequent result of religious in-
struction, that spiritual maladies come from
the desire to convert the souls of children, num-
erous proofs can be given. I have heard child-
ren of six years speak with holy horror of
their four-year-old brother who dug with a
spade on Sunday. On the other hand I have
heard a six-year-old child who was dragged in
one day to three church services ask after re-
flection whether it was not more tolerable to
go to hell immediately.
The Judaic Christian conception of a crea-
tive and sustaining providence, which gives the
fullest perfection to all things, is so absolutely
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300 The Century of the Child
opposed to all that experience and evolution
teaches us about existence, that one cannot
even conceive of the possibility of holding both
ideas theoretically at the same time. Much
less can one practically unite them by the
paste of compromise. The child with sharp-
sighted simplicity does not allow himself to
be deceived. If we do not wish to speak the
truth then let us not speak to children about
life at all — ^hfe in its unity and diversity, its
manifold creative acts, its process of continu-
ous creation, its eternal divine subjection to
law.
But this means that it is impossible to save
the Christian God for children, after the child
begins to think about this God, in whom he is
taught blind confidence. Nor can the child
be prepared in this way for the new concep-
tion of God with its religious, its uniting and
elevating power, I mean for the conception of
a (Jod whose revealed book is the starry heav-
ens, and whose prophetic sight is in the unfath-
omable sea, and in the deeps of man's heart, the
God who is in life and is Kfe. Nothing shows
better how imperfect is the real belief of mod-
ern thinkers, than the fact that they always
teach their children a system which they do
not wish to live by spiritually themselves, but
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Religious Instruction 301
which they hold as indispensable for the moral
and social future of the child.
When we pass from the conception of provi-
dence to the conception of sin, we find in child-
ren the same natural logic. A small girl, an
only child, asked: " How could God allow his
only child to be killed? You could not have
done it to me I " And a small boy said, " It is a
very good thing for us that the Jews crucified
Christ, so that nothing happened to us."
These are both poles of an emotional and a
practical way of looking at the Atonement.
Within them all similar circumferences arc
drawn. To a more comic and naive sphere of
ideas belongs the proposal of a small girl to
call the Virgin Mary God's wife. Also there
is the story of a boy who spoke in school of Our
Lord and the two other Lords, meaning the
Trinity.
From the classes in Bible history and cate-
chism, there are innumerable examples of
children reading the words incorrectly, and
misunderstanding the ideas they stand for. A
boy, warned to keep the lamps burning, an-
swered contentedly, "We have petroleum
gratis." Another, asked whether he would
like to be bom again, said, " No, I might be
turned into a girl." These are typical ex-
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302 The Century of the Child
amples. There is an anecdote of a child, who,
on being consoled with the statement that
God was in the dark near her, asked her mother
to put God out and light the lamp. Another
child, seeing the pictures of the Christian
martyrs in the arena, cried out sympathetically,
"Look at that poor tiger; he hasn't got a
Christian." These are a few out of a mass of
examples, typical of the explanation given by
children to the rehgious ideas they receive,
notions forcing them into a world of ideas
which they either accept in a material sense, or
by which they are absolutely nonplussed.
The childish circle of ideas is revealed by
anecdotes of this kind, or by the comment of a
small girl who asked when she heard that she
had been bom about eleven o'clock at night,
" How could I have remained out so late? "
These examples show that such conceptions
as original sin, the fall of man, regeneration
and salvation, are first necessarily meaningless
words, and afterwards terribly difficult words.
In my whole life fear of hell never absorbed
my attention for five minutes, but I know child-
ren and grown people who are martyrs to this
terror. I know children too who, when belief
in hell was presented to them in school as ab-
solutely necessary, bewailed that their mother
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Religious Instruction 303
had said she did not helieve in hell, and there-
fore thought she must be very wicked.
We are certainly a long way off from those
times when, to use the picturesque expression
of an historian of civilisation, " The fear of
the devil constantly darkened the life of men,
as the shadow of the sails of a windmill dark-
ens the windows of the miller "; far from the
times, too, when divine persons constantly re-
vealed themselves to the believer, and when
miracles belonged just as really to the daily
habits of thought as to-day they are disre-
garded even by the believer. But so long as
belief in the devil, providence and miracles is
upheld in religious instruction, it will be im-
possible for the sunshine of the civilised view,
which is the scientific as opposed to the super-
stitious view, to penetrate the darkness where
the bacilli of cruelty and insanity are nurtured.
The ideas children form of heaven are gen-
erally fine examples of childish realism. A
child thought his brother could not be in
heaven, because he would have to climb a
ladder, and so would be disobedient, for he
had been forbidden to climb one. A girl
asked, when she heard that her grandmother
was in heaven, whether God was sitting there
and holding her from falling out. These are
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304 The Century of the Child
a few of the many proofs of the child's sense
of reality, that leads to mistaken answers here,
as in so many other instances. If it is said
hy way of protest that the childish imagina-
tion needs myths and symbolism, the answer
is an easy one. We cannot and should not
rob the child of the play of imagination, but
play should not be taken in earnest. It is not
to be wondered at that children construct
for themselves realistic ideas about spiritual
things. This practice is no more to be op-
posed, than any of the other expressions of
the life of the child's soul. But when these
false ideas are presented as the highest truth
of life, they must disturb the sacred simplicity
of the child.
I know children in whom the origin of un-
belief is to be traced to the words of Jesus,
that everything asked for by the believing
heart will be received. A small child, locked
up in a dark room, prayed that God might
show people how badly he was being treated,
by causing a lamp of precious stones to be lit
in the dark. Another asked to have a sick
mother saved; another prayed by the side of
a dead companion that she might rise again.
For all these three, the experience of having
their most believing, most fervent prayer un-
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Religious Instruction 305
answered, was the great turning point in their
spiritual lif e, I can authenticate from my own
experience and the experiences of others the
ethical revolt which the cases of injustice in
the Old Testament — for example God's pre-
ference of Jacob over Esau — occasion in a
healthy child. The explanations offered in this
case and in others like it fill the child with
silent contempt. When the child ends in find-
ing that adults themselves do not believe the re-
ligion they teach, the childish instinct for belief
and for reverence, that capacity which is the
real ground for all religious feeling, is injured
for Ufe.
I will say nothing of the heroes and heroines
of the pious literature written for children,
with their stories of conversion and holiness.
Parents are able to protect their children from
them. I speak here only of that way of look-
ing at the world, which is forced on children
with or against the will of their parents. This
degrades their conceptions of God, of Jesus,
of natiu^e. These conceptions, the child if
left to himself can develop simply or power-
fully. It is this way of looking at the world
that causes unnecessary suffering and danger-
ous prejudices. The inclination of the diild
to deep religious feeling, sound faith, and
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3o6 The Century of the Child
ardent zeal for holiness will be strengthened
by an ability to draw the standards of life as
freely from the Bible as from the world's lit-
erature. The same result will be produced by
books on other religions, like Buddhism, from
the great religious personalities who illustrate
the struggle for an ideal, and from such child-
ren's books as show like efforts in a healthy
form. No child has the shghtest need of the
catechism or theology for his religion or for
his training; no other church history is needed
than that connected with the general history
of the world. In this last study the chief
stress should be laid in teaching on the errors,
in order to impress on the young the convic-
tion, that all new truths are called by their
contemporaries " errors." In other words
these " errors *' are the best negative material
man has for discovering the truth.
Working over and explaining the contra-
dictions met with by the child in such rehgious
instruction, as I am outlining here, belongs to
the preparation for a true life, in which people
have to put up with innumerable contradic-
tions. But this personal work injures neither
the piety nor the soundness of the child's soul.
Such injuries come rather from irritating
pietism or vain hypocrisy, from spiritual
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Religious Instruction 307
f anaticism, from deceits of the reason, barren-
ness of soul, or perverted feeling of right, all
of which are the notorious results of Christian
training and Christian instruction, given ac-
cording to the usual methods of the present
day. For the present as well as for the future,
a child will be able to solve more easily these
spiritual problems if his fine feeling for right
and his quick logic have not been dulled by
the dogmatic answers to those eternal prob-
lems, that place him in as much difiiculty as
the thinker.
Kant exposed long ago the most serious in-
juries of the kind of religious instruction
which still prevails. He showed that by mak-
ing the church's teaching the basis of moral-
ity, improper motives were assigned to action.
A thing must be avoided, not because God has
forbidden it, but because it is in and for itself
wrong. Man must aim at good, not because
heaven or hell awaits the good or the bad, but
because good has a higher value than evil. To
this point of view of Kant there must be added
the truth, that a position is ethically weaken-
ing, when man is presented as incapable of
doing good by his own power. So he is told
in this as in all other cases, he must be humble
and trust in God's help. Confidence in our
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3o8 The Century of the Child
strength and the feeling of our own responsi-
bility have a strong moral influence. The be-
lief that man in sin-laden, without chance of
change, has led him to remain where he is.
If the future generation is to grow up with
upright souls, the first condition of such growth
is to obhterate from the existence of children
and young people, by a mighty scratch of the
pen, the catechism, Bible history, theology and
church history.
We must bow down before the infinities and
mysteries of our earthly existence and of the
world beyond. We must distinguish between
and select real ethical values; we must be con-
vinced of the soKdarity of mankind, of man's
individual duty, to construct for the benefit
of the whole race a rich and strong personahty.
We must look to great models. We must
reverence the divine and the regular in the
course of the world, in the processes of de-
velopment of man's mind. These are the new
lines of meditation, the new religious feelings
of reverence and love, that will make the
children of the new century strong, sound, and
beautiful.
These changes will destroy that idea of God
that combines " God help us " with our vic-
tories, that has increased the n^-tional lust for
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Religious Instruction 309
conquest, the passion for mastery, the instinct
of gain. It will be felt that mixing up God in
the standards of human passions is blasphem-
ous. People will see, that patriotism, nour-
ished on egoism and ambition, is the most
godless thing because the most inhimian of all
the life-perverting sins with which man out-
rages the holiness of life.
Intellects which can now pass over the con-
tradiction between Christianity and war, which
can even derive strength and consolation from
them, have been depraved by the ideas forced
upon mankind through thousands of years.
'Nothing more can be expected from men of
such brains, than that they should die in the
wilderness, without ever obtaining a sight of
the promised land.
But the brains of children can be protected
from the most unholy of all mental miscon-
ceptions, from the superstition that the pa-
triotism, and the nationalism, which injures
the rights of others, have something in com-
mon with ideas about God.
Let children be taught that national char-
acteristics, the use of force, the right of
independent action, is as essential for a people
as for an individual, that it is worth every sac-
rifice. Let them be taught that, on their
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3IO The Century of the Child
appreciation of the nature of their country, of
its Kfe in the past and in the present, depends
their own development. Let them be taught
to dream beautiful inspiring dreams of the
future of their country, of their own work, as
the necessary foundation of this future.
They should be taught at an early age to
understand the deep gulf betwteen patrioticJ
feeling and the egoism which is called pa-
triotism. This is the patriotism in whose
name small countries are oppressed by great
countries, in whose name nineteenth-century
Europe has armed itself under the stimulus of
revenge, in whose name the close of the cen-
tury witnessed the extension of violence in
north and south, in west and east.
Militarism and clericalism, both principles
presenting authority as opposed to individual
standards of right, are ever closely combined;
but they are not what they are called. They
are not patriotism and religion. These two
words involve a sense of common citizenship,
of freedom, of justice, exalted above the nar-
row sphere of the individual, of the interests of
class, of the interests of one's own country.
Such are the principles which unite different
groups within a land in great interests com-
mon to all, just as they unite different peoples
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Religious Instruction 311
in great vital questions common to all. But
militarism and clericalism oppress freedom by
the principles of authority, oppress the idea of
individual development, by that of discipline,
oppress the feeling of common weal by the
desire for glory and war, oppress the feeling
for right by the feeling for military honour.
In Grcnnany under the badge of Christianity
and militarism, the civil rights of the citizen,
his claims for social freedom, have been seri-
ously menaced. Hypnotised by these prin-
ciples many members of the Russian, French,
and English nations, respectable as they are
individually, have gloated over the deeds of
unrighteousness committed by their respective
governments.
All this will go on; people will continue to
be burdened to the ground by ever increasing
military preparations. The rights of the
small nations will be constantly encroached
upon by the larger ones, even after the present
world powers, like those that have preceded
them, have broken down under the burden of
their own expansion. It will continue to be
so, until mothers implant in the souls of their
children the feeling for humanity before the
feeling for their country; until they strive to
expand the sympathies of their children to
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312 The Century of the Child
embrace all living things, plants, animals, and
men; until they teach them to see, that sympa-
thy involves not only suffering with others but
rejoicing with others, and that the individual
increases his own emotional capacity, when he
learns to feel with other individuals and with
other peoples. It will go on, as it is now, un-
til mothers implant in the souls of their child-
ren the certainty, that the patriotism which,
in the name of national interests, treads mider
foot the rights of other people, is to be con-
demned* The moment children midertake to
act as adults, we shall see a harmony between
ideas so taught and facts. When the con-
ception of nationalism in the child's mind is
freed from injustice and arrogance; when the
idea of God is freed from its debased union
with a selfish patriotism, then the idea of the
soldier will be ennobled. It will no longer be
identified with bhnd obedience and limited
class courage. The word will come to mean
a man and a feUow-citizen with the same
civilised interests, the same conception of
law, the same need of freedom, the same
feeling for honour, as all other fellow-
citizens. The soldier will be a defender of
his fatherland, whose character will have no
other warlike traits, than those called forth
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Religious Instruction 313
for the protection of sacred human and civil
rights.
Self-defense, personal or national, will be
imprinted on the child as the first of duties,
not as it is represented in the commands of
Christianity. Or to speak njore accurately
the child has this instinctive feeling; all that
need be done is not to confuse this instinct.
The child understands quite well, that evil
men, when not resisted, become lords over the
property of others. He knows that the low
and the unrighteous get the victory, and that
right-thinking and high-minded people are
sacrificed by unrighteous and low-thinking
people. The impulse to resistance is the first
germ of the social feeling for righteousness,
and by this feeling will the unreflecting judg-
ment of the child be led also in the study of
history. The child never doubts that Wil-
liam Tell was right, even when, in his instruc-
tion in religion, he has been definitely taught
obedience to the powers that be, that come
from God. Every straight childish soul ap-
plauds Andreas Hofer, despite his uncom-
promising conflict with lawful authority. With
his natural directness the child cuts oflf all soph-
isms; at least all children do who are not
irrevocably stupefied by Christian principles.
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314 The Century of the Child
To conclude what I have said against re-
ligious instruction, I will add a statement of
a ten-year-old child, made after three years
struggling with the catechism and hihlical his-
tory: "I do not believe any of this, but I
hope, when men are some day wise enough,
each person may have his own belief, just as
each one has his own face/'
This small philosopher in these words hit
imconsciously upon the most serious spiritual
injury done by religious instruction. It
forces on man's mind a special view of the
world, like a conventional mask on a man's
face. But freedom and the rights of the
soul's life can only be secured by its own re-
flections. The soul itself must work out that
assurance of belief in which man can live and
die. For generations the great spiritual dan-
gers of mankind have been caused by looking
backwards to find the ideal and the truth, by
regarding both as once for all given, as ab-
solutely limited.
As soon as a child becomes conscious of
himself he should feel that he is a discoverer
with infinities before him. The king's son, in
the realm of life, will no longer do menial serv-
ice as a prodigal son in a foreign land. With
the whole power of his will, he can repeat
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Religious Instruction 315
those old words, " I will arise and go to my
father."
When Jaquino di Fiori in the Middle Ages
preached of the Kingdom of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost, till his hair became
as silvery grey as the leaves of the olive tree,
he compared these three realms with the
nettle, the rose, and the lily, the light of the
stars, the simlight, and the sim.
In all the ends of the world this preaching
is being heard now. But that dream of a
Third Kingdom, pure as the lily, warm as the
sun, can only be realised in the temper of the
child who looks for life and happiness, who
brushes away joyously and frankly the clouds
of man's fall and man's humiliation.
Without becoming as little children, men
cannot enter into the Third Kingdom, the
Kingdom of the Holy Ghost, the Kingdom of
the human spirit.
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CHAPTER Vin
CHILD LABOUB AND THE CRIMES OF CHUDBEN
Leaving aside questions of heredity and
kindred topics, and considering only the con-
ditions under which the child is born, developed,
and reared, it is terrible to contemplate the
misfortunes which happen to children through
lack of insight on the part of their mothers.
Doctors are never tired of telling what mal-
formations tight-lacing causes. How many
children in the first year of their life become
blind through neglect. We only mention
here some of the troubles which crude ignor-
ance or lack of conscience on the part of the
mothers inflict on themselves or on their child-
ren. There must be noticed too the uncer-
tainty and the want of system in the care of
children that come from such ignorance. A
thorough improvement in all these things is
not to be expected until women have secured
universal suffrage, and until they, at the same
age in which men serve their years of military
service, are legally obliged to pass through
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 317
a period of training lasting just as long, de-
voting themselves to the care of children, hy-
giene, and sick nursing. No other exceptions
must be made, except those which exempt a
man from military service. Such duties done
for one's country would come for many
women just at the time in which their interest
in the subject is awakened by marrying or the
thought of marrying. This training would
give a profounder meaning to their thoughts
on this subject. But even women who never
become mothers themselves would in this way
learn certain general principles of psy-
chology, hygiene, and care of the sick, that
they might make use of afterwards in every
station of life. Further, I look for increasing
limitations of the right of parents over child-
ren. Such limitations I mean as those which
have forbidden the exposure of children, have
imposed penalties for child murder, for cruelty
towards children, and the laws which have en-
forced obligatory attendance at school. In
England there are organisations which inves-
tigate the treatment of children at home and
which prevent cruelties against them. Moth-
ers who forget their duties can be reported
and punished with imprisonment; neglectful
fathers can be ma^^^ to support their children,
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3i8 The Century of the Child
etc.; and where parents show themselves hope-
lessly incompetent children can be taken from
them by law. In the different states of Grcr-
many there are also laws which allow children
to be taken from parents who, through misuse
of that relationship, injure the child's spirit-
ual or bodily welfare. Children receive this
so-called compulsory training in cases, too,
where it is necessary to preserve them from
moral destruction. The compulsory training
may be carried out either in a suitable fam-
ily or in institutions; it continues up to the
eighteenth year. A notable provision is that
which places the supervision over such child-
ren, in the hands of women.
An increased extension of the right of so-
ciety in this direction is one of its most im-
portant provisions for self -protection, and is
just as legitimate a limitation of individual
freedom, as the laws to prevent the extension
of contagious diseases. Unfortmiately such
regulations are often made ineffective by red
tape. The parents or guardians of the neg-
lected child must be admonished; the unruly
child must be warned, and if this is not suffi-
cient, the law provides that it must be dis-
ciplined. All of these provisos are absolutely
senseless in such cases. By such warnings
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 319
bad parents are not instructed in the art of
training their children, nor is an incorrigible
child to be led by admonitions to change its
character, if he is left in the surroimdings
which have caused his degeneration. By
corporal punishment administered in the pre-
sence of witnesses, a child already accustomed
to cuffs and blows is made more hardened and
shameless. A person with only a superficial
knowledge of the subject, enough to under-
stand the causes which produce such parents
and such children, soon realises that he is
concerned in each detail with the infinite hori-
zon of the social question. It is clear for ex-
ample that low wages, combined with the work
of women and children, are the main factors
in poor dwellings, insufiicient food, and bad
clothing. The fact that the wife works out
of the house causes the neglect of the children
and the home. The lodging-house system is
the result of the lack of dwellings; want of
comfort at home causes the husband to fre-
quent saloons and public houses. All these
factors, taken together, cause inmioraUty and
intemperance; these last again produce those
physical and mental diseases to which children
are often heirs at their birth.
Leaving out of discussion the notion that
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320 The Century of the Child
by Grod's help the battlefields are covered with
torn, maimed beings, with whose destroyed
brains innumerable thoughts and feeUngs are
extinguished which could have enriched hu-
manity, I know no more abnormal idea than
the custom of people speaking of a guardian
angel when a chance has kept two children
from an accident. Where is this guardian
angel in the innumerable other cases of mis-
fortune: when children remain alone because
their mother must go to work and they fall
out of the window or into the fire? When
they lose their eyesight in dark cellars? When
they are pressed to death because in miserable
lodgings they have to share a bed with their
parents? When the parents are drunk and
the children lose their lives? Where is this
guardian angel when parents murder their
children, from religious fanaticism or disgust
of life: when the children themselves, tired
of life or through fear of parental cruelty, take
their own lives? Where are these protective
angels on the occasions when they are most
wanted? — ^in the narrow streets of great cities,
in the great industrial centres where lack of
simlight, of pure air, and of all the other
primary conditions for the development of
soul and body, undermines the bodily strength
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 321
and efficiency of children before their
birth?
To see the hand of Providence in an acci-
dental case of preservation, while the same
Providence is released from all share in natural
occurrences, from all part in the terrible phe-
nomena of society, that fill every second of the
earth's existence with terror, is a relic of super-
stition to be overcome if man is to be filled with
a sense of obligation to conditions he must
master and mould. Modem man is ever be-
coming more and more his own Providence; he
has already protected himself against fire by
fire engines and fire insurance, against the sea
by life-saving stations; against smallpox and
cholera, diphtheria and tuberculosis, he has
found other means of defence. The blind be-
lief that death is dependent on God's will man
is losing by the witness of statistics which de-
clare that duration of life increases with im-
proved sanitary condition; which show that
when disease or summer heat mows down the
children of the poor in dark tenements the rich
man can preserve his own children in his
healthy, light dwelling.
Every man who has his heart in the right
spot does not wait for an angel, but rushes to
save a child from danger. But the supersti-
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32 2 The Century of the Child
tious belief of the majority of people in God's
Providence perhaps will cause the same man
to regard with complete apathy conditions
by which miUions and millions of children are
yearly sacrificed. Doctors know that the de-
struction caused by bacteria is insignificant,
as compared with pauperism as a cause of dis-
ease. Mothers who have over-exerted them-
selves, drunken fathers, bad dwellings, like
those where the poor dry out newly built houses
for the rich, induced by the low rate of rents,
insufficient nourishment, inherited diseases, es-
pecially syphilis, too early work, — all this
shows its result in the emaciated, shrivelled,
ulcerated bodies of children who occasionally
are cured of their momentary disease in hospi-
tals, but cannot be freed from the results of
the conditions of life under which they were
bom and brought up. The efforts of doctors
will be in vain while they, like the other fac-
tors in society, do not devote their whole energy
to avoiding diseases, instead of healing them.
What they can now do in the way of preven-
tion is but a palliative in comparison with the
incurable evil which flourishes in abimdance.
The situation will remain as it is so long as hy-
giene does not receive the same attention in
society as the soul. This solicitude may take
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 323
the form of religious edification, or intellectual
enlightenment, but it remains nothing but a
cut flower, stuck in a dust heap.
It is possible, with sufficient certainty, to
show from criminal statistics that degenerate
children are the creation of society itself. By
allowing them to be forced into " the path of
virtue," by punishment, society behaves like a
tyrant, who has put out a man's eyes and then
beats him because he cannot by himself find
his road.
The categorical imperative for the social
consciousness at the present moment, is an
effective legislation for the protection of child-
ren and women.
Wherever industry is developed, the woman
is taken away from the home, the child from
play and school. In the period of guilds,
women and children worked in the house, and
in the workshop of the husband. But since
the factory system has constantly restricted the
household work of woman, industrial occupa-
tions on the scale of modern capitalism can
satisfy its needs for cheaper work by woman's
work. This like children's work has forced
down in many places the pay of adult work-
men. The pay with which a married man can
care for his family by his work is now divided
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324 The Century of the Child
among several members of the family. As
long as special work required great personal
bodily strength or developed manual dexterity,
it feU as a rule to the men, not to women or
children. But the natural protection of wo-
men and children disappeared with the intro-
duction of machinery. In many cases working
a machine required neither strength nor dex-
terity. In other cases, Uke cotton spinning or
mining, delicate fingers were more valued be-
cause they were more adaptable, tender bodies
more desirable because they were smaller.
In England the work of women and children
first reached its highest point. The poor-
houses sent crowds of children to the wool
weaving industry in Lancashire, children
who worked in shifts at the same machine and
slept in the same dirty beds. The population
in the industrial districts pined away, as the
result; diseases imknown before came into ex-
istence; ignorance and roughness increased.
Women and children from four to five years
old worked fourteen to eighteen hours. The
report of the investigations made on this sub-
ject caused Elizabeth Barrett to write her
poem, " The Cry of the Children " that made
the employers of children so indignant, but
which helped to produce the Ten Hour bill.
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 325
This bill laid down that women, children, and
young persons should not work more than ten
hours a day in textile factories. This law was
succeeded by others of the same type. Similar
conditions in other lands have produced simi-
lar legislation. In Saxony, Belgium, Alsace,
and the Rhine Provinces the results of the
system seemed to be just as frightful as in
England. On the Rhine, as early as the year
1838, a Prussian army officer noticed that the
number of those able to bear arms had dimin-
ished as a result of the degenerating influence
of woman and child labour. But notwith-
standing the introduction of this legislation
generally, the labour of women and children
continues. It takes the most destructive
forms in those occupations which lie outside of
the sphere of legislation. There are places in
which child labour is as shocking as it was in
England in 1848. In Russia, in the Bastmat
weaving industry, children of three or four
years have been found at work; and masses of
children under ten working as much as eigh-
teen hours a day. In Germany the toy in-
dustry can show as cruel figures in connection
with children's work, all the more cruel because
in order to provide enjoyment for happy
children the living energy of others is forced
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326 The Century of the Child
out of existence. Industrial work at home is
done by children four to five years old, while
the age limit for child labom* in factories, both
in Germany and in Switzerland, is fourteen
years. The government of Denmark has pro-
posed the same limit of age. In Italy most of
the crippled young children were brought up
in the sulphm* districts of Sicily, crowded to-
gether in low galleries, burdened with heavy
sacks at an age at which their tender limbs un-
der such conditions must inevitably and in-
curably be contorted. As early as twelve and
thirteen years old many of them are incapable
of work. In the magnesium mines of Spain,
quantities of children six to eight years old
are kept at work; through the poisonous odours
they fall victims to severe diseases. Other
children carrying heavy pitchers on their
head are employed to water dry places. The
child is a cheaper means of transportation than
the ass.
Despite protective legislation the average
of height and weight in the Lancashire children
is and continues to be lower than anywhere
else. Of the two thousand children investi-
gated in this district only one hundred and
fifty-one were really sound and strong; one
hundred and ninety-eight were seriously crip-
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 327
pled; the rest more or less under the standard
of good health. All work in the cotton indus-
try done from six o'clock in the morning till
five in the evening changes, so this doctor says,
the hopeful ten-year-old child into the thin
pallid thirteen-year-old boy. This degenera-
tion of the population in industrial districts
is becoming a serious danger for England's
future.
After people are convinced that all civilised
nations are exposed to this same danger, in-
dustrial and street work of children will be
everjrwhere forbidden. This will be a victory
for the principle of child protection, which, in
this as in other like spheres, was opposed at
first on both economic and industrial grounds.
Among these was the imcontested right of
fathers to decide on the work of their children.
It is not alone the question of child labour
that reveals the low standpoint taken by the
civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved
also by the introduction of corporal punish-
ment. Corporal punishment is as humiliating
for him who gives it as for him who receives it;
it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor
physical pain have any other effect than a
hardening one, when the blow is deUvered in
cold blood long after the act occasioning it has
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328 The Century of the Child
been done. Most of the victims are so accus-
tomed to blows already that the physical effect
is httle or nothing, but they awaken feel-
ings of detestation against a society which so
avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child
is sensitive, corporal pimishment can produce
deep spiritual torment, as was the case with
Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some
years ago met his death by drowning. Every-
body knows his story from the fine accoimt of
him by the Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in
his childhood, had taken a plank, a piece of
driftwood, and sold it. For this he was con-
demned to be punished. Till late in Uf e, what
he had suflFered was ever present with him.
He was not ashamed of his action but of his
pimishment — ^a punishment which embittered
the whole life of a really great character.
The blows administered by society are in-
flicted on children whose poverty and neg-
lected education are in most cases responsible
for their faults. The victims, often emaciated
by hunger, and trembling with shame or ter-
ror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to
be the basis of moral shame.
If the statistics of the life-history of those
who are so disciplined were revealed, we should
find that the majority come from, and return
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 329
to, a home where the mother, as a result of
working out of the home, is hindered from car-
ing for her children. They have suffered from
the custom of sleeping together, the result of
overcrowded dwellings, with its demoralising
influence. It may be the child has commenced
to make his living on the street as messenger,
cigar picker, or newspaper boy, or has been
engaged in such like occupations, and so in his
immediate neighbourhood has seen the luxuri-
ous living of the upper classes, which he
strives to imitate. Hardly a week passes that
the street youngster does not read about the
embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the capital-
istic classes, frequently committed by grey-
headed men, whose childish impressions go
back to the good old time, on whom the lax
education of the present could not have any in-
fluence. No day passes in which he does not
see how the representatives of the upper
classes, old and young alike, satisfy their de-
sires for pleasure. But from the child of the
tenement and the street, people expect Spar-
tan virtue or try to thrash it into him. It is
hard to say which is greater here, stupidity
or savagery.
While the upper classes show that they are
crude, immoderate, lazy, devoted to enjoying
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33^ The Century of the Child
themselves; while the majority are aiming at
getting and spending money; while so many
are able to eat without working, and so few
can find work who look for it; while careless
luxury hves side by side with careless neces-
sity, the upper class has not the shadow of right
to expect an improved lower class. TKe so-
ciety of the present day creates and maintains
a social system whose eflfects are notorious in
the economic crimes of the upper and lower
class ahke. It is not surprising that great
cities are full of tramps and street urchins,
like a spoilt cheese full of maggots.
A destroyed home life, an idiotic school sys-
tem, premature work in the factory, stupefy-
ing Ufe in the streets, these are what the great
city gives to the children of the imder classes.
It is more astonishing that the better instincts
of human nature generally are victorious in
the lower class, than the fact that this result
is occasionally reversed.
There is another argimient against child
labour, to be found in its immediate eflfect on
industry itself.
Working men trained in the schools are
everywhere notoriously most efficient; even in
Russia, where popular education is still so de-
fective, this experience has been noted. The
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 331
working man able to read and to write receives
without exception on that account a higher
pay than the illiterate ones who can be only
used for the coarsest kind of work. The
present development of German industry, as
compared with English, is to be ascribed
among other things to the superior educational
training of the German people. The inten-
sive and intelligent work of the American
working man has apparently the same cause.
But when children made sleepy by work in
the factory enter evening schools, or when
children are taken too early from school,
they lose under continuous hard work the de-
sire and possibility of adapting themselves
to a higher education; they become organic
machines which feed the inorganic ones. This
must cause the value of their work to de-
cline. These organic machines are passive,
they do not try to improve their condition
of Ufe, as do the higher workmen. Besides
living machines cannot increase the product of
labour. Intelligent working men who watch
over their own rights and increase them are
also those who learn easiest new methods of
work, discover new inventions which are of ad-
vantage to their hne of work, and so increase
the value of their product. It is only by the
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332 The Century of the Child
growth of this class of workmen, that any
country to-day can stand the pressure of
foreign competition. But the chief condition
of this growth is that the bodily and mental
powers of the child shall be used for his own
development in school games and play; at the
same time his capacity for work must be
trained by occupation at home and in the
technical school, not by work in a factory.
Some years ago, a poem created a furore
over the whole civilised world, from Canada
to the islands of Polynesia. The author of
this poem, Edwin Markham, was inspired by
Millet's simple and wonderful picture, The
Man with the Hoe. An agricultural labourer
with bowed back stands there, one hand folded
on the other, supported on the handle of the
hoe. Millet in him has eternalised the ex-
pression so often observed in old workmen,
especially in those who are worn out by day
labour. The man's face is empty, says no-
thing, every human aspect has disappeared; we
only see in his face the look of the patient beast
of burden. For while moderate work ennobles
the animal in man, inunoderate work kills hu-
manity in the beast.
Millet's picture was to the poet, who was once
himself a slave to bodily labor, a revelation.
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 333
the eternal artistic type of the generation of
man bowed down from childhood tmder the
yoke of labour. In one strophe after another
of that finely conceived poem he pictures this
being that does not sorrow, and never hopes,
his destroyed soul for which Plato and the
Pleiades, the sunrise and the rose, all the treas-
ures of mind and nature, are nothing. The
poet asks sovereigns, masters, and governors
how they will restore to this thing a soul, how
they will give it music and dreams. What, he
asks, will become of the people who have made
this being what it is now; when after a thou-
sand years' silence God's terrible question is
answered, — ^What has become of his soul.
Many such employers of labour go to
church, they hear explanations of texts like
these, " Inasmuch as ye did it unto . . . even
the least of these, ... ye did it tmto me. All
that ye wish others should do to you, that do to
them." It does not occur to them to think how
Jesus, the most inconsiderate of men, at the
right place, would have characterised their de-
mands to have small children employed in glass
works at ten years of age. It never occurs to
them to ask whether they would like to see their
own children in these factories or others like
them.
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334 The Century of the Child
This complete dualism between life and
teaching in our present-day society will con-
tinue to exist tmtil people realise that the opin-
ions about life which are expressed by the lips,
but are denied by deeds, should no longer be
proclaimed as an absolute explanation of life
and rule of life. The permanent element in
Christianity can only be reahsed through the
conviction that mankind is master of Christ-
ianity just as it is over all its other creations.
The ardent idea of the Gahlean carpenter,
fraternity among men, will give man no rest
tmtil man has wiped out the last trace of in-
justice in his social relations. But the thought
will not be realised by those ideals regarded by
Jesus as absolute. This is the point of view
which has crippled man's conscience and it ap-
plies equally to the realisation of this and all
other ideals. An ideal impossible to carry out
under the ordinary assumptions of human life,
yet to which men have given the authority of
a divine revelation, and which they conceive
of as absolute, this is the main cause for the
demoralisation which has gone on for nineteen
hundred years. The history of humanity has
really revealed to men how this absolute ideal
of theirs has been betrayed. The cause of
this demoralisation must cease before existence
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 335
can be remodelled seriously by those who are
convinced that ideals can really be binding.
People will then not do as they do now, mis-
use the name of the Father, whom Jesus has
taught men to proclaim with their lips, will not
murder one another en masse on the battle-
field, to solve political and economic questions
of supremacy. A society which calls itself
Christian will no longer tolerate capital pun-
ishment, prostitution, stock exchange gamb-
ling, and child slavery. Men will not then
as they do now, learn on their mother's
breast to love their neighbours as themselves,
and then tread in the footsteps of their fathers,
trampling one another down in the struggle for
bread.
Our reverence for God will then be found in
our capacity to humanise existence by human-
ising the human race.
The youth of our day have not always suc-
cessfully passed out of the Christian circles
of ideals into another circle. The successful
method would be to face immediately new pur-
poses and aims that are really believed, and
for which men wish to live. But many of our
young generation know of no new purposes
and aims in which they can believe. Hence
comes that spiritual apathy which has mas-
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336 The Century of the Child
tared a great part of the young generation.
Without undervaluing the influences of en-
vironment, I still believe that young people
who have lost their ideals without getting new
ones in their place are to be pitied. The
young who are not making ideals out of their
own souls will have no other time than this to
find ideals. A generation of yotmg men of
this type laughed at Socrates. They would
have nailed Jesus of Nazareth to the Cross,
with a shrug of the shoulders; they would have
become, undoubtedly, in 1789, emigres with
the Bourbons.
When the youth of any period remains with-
out ideals, we pass through a fin de dhcle per-
iod no matter what the exact date may be. But
when the young generation is inspired with
the feeling of having great acts to do, a new
century begins. It is always the fortunate
right of young people to stimulate individual-
ism before everything else. This is done every
time a young person full of sound egoism
develops his own personality completely and
powerfully, throws himself keenly into the
struggle for his own fortune. Any one who
takes his individual development seriously
will find that it is hard to become an indei)end-
ent, noble, and exalted personality by treading
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 337
underfoot other individuals. He will more-
over see that it makes more demands on his
personal powers to try to create new values by
new means, to devote his youthful energy to
new tasks, than to look back to ideas that are
already exhausted. There is another truth
the young man will soon find to be valid. If an
individual throws himself into the struggle of
life without consideration for any one else, he
is all the more Ukely to get hurt in the strug-
gle. The more developed, too, an individual
is, the more assailable points there are about
him to be wounded. Great pain, as well as
great happiness, is for great men a part of the
fulness of life. Failures of a personality are
often better proofs that it is above the average
than its victories. But failures, even if they
frequently leave our innermost personality
shattered, can be borne, when we have learnt
that there is a bandage to heal our own wounds,
the bandage, I mean, that we lay on the
wotmds of others.
No real man needs to wait until life has
taught him, to sympathise with others. The
inspiring age of youth may experience this, as
well as the strong individual feeling of power.
In this sense, many remain ever young, al-
ways able to pass through inspired moments,
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338 The Century of the Child
such moments when a great action, a great
truth, a great and beautiful thing, or great
good fortune, absorbs our whole existence; mo-
ments when our eyes j&ll with tears, when our
arms stretch out to embrace the world and the
thoughts which it contains. Such moments
include the most intensive emotion of our own
personality; at the same time they bring the
fullest absorption in the common feeling of
existence as a whole. A great life means
giving continuity of action to such inspired
moments.
There are yotmg people who can look back
on no such moments, who arrogantly look
down on the problems of their times from the
height of their " superman " theories or from
their superior learning; who measure them
by the iron law of historical development. At
all times there have been such people. There
is no question in which it is more fatal for
young people to isolate themselves, than that
which deals with social conflicts. This age
requires the young above all others to test this
question from all points of view, to investigate
all other ideas in connection with it. Every
reform plan must be investigated in connection
with its influence on the problems of indi-
viduaUsm and socialism. From youth we have
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Child Labour and Child Crimes 339
a right to expect something for the future.
This hope imphes that youth, in approaching
it, in thinking and acting for the many whose
lot it is the inunediate task of the future to
improve, adopt as their own the words of Walt
Whitman, " I do not ask whether my wounded
brother suflFers; I will myself be this wounded
brother/*
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Jl: Selection from the
Catalogue of
G. V. PUTNAM'S SONS
Complete Catalogues sent
on application
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Clever, original, and fascinating
The Lost Art of Reading
Mount Tom Edition
New Edition in Two Volumes
L The Child and the Book
A Manual for Parents and for Teachers in
Schools and Colleges
IL The Lost Art of Readmg
or. The Man and The Book
Two Volumes, Crown Svo. Sold separately.
Each net, $150
By Gerald Stanley Lee
'* I must express with your connivance the joy I have had,
the enthusiasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of
what I believe is the most brilliant book of any season since
Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. The title does
not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. It is
a highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism
in education, library science, science in general, and life in
general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in
form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who
is not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tin-
glingly alive, and as if furnished with long antennse of sug-
gestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but I know this
— that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine
that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical
writers of New England.
'* I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with
loud cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be
spoken just now. It makes me believe that after all we
have n't a great kindergarten about us in authorship, but that
there is virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the
date of the publication of this book may well be the date of
the moral and intellectual renaissance for which we have long
been scanning the horizon." — ^Wm. Sloans Kennedy in
Boston Transcript,
New York— G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS— London
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Jt Book for Parents and Teachers
Up Through Childhood
A Stody of Some Principles of Education in
Relation to Faith and Conduct
By
George Allen Hobbell. PIlD. (Colombia)
Vlc«-PrMldMit of BerMi Collog •
With Introdactlon by
Dr. Frank M. McMurray
Ttmttm College, N. Y.
121DO. $L25 oet> By auiH $L40
The book is divided into four parts: Part I., dealing
with the School of Life, in which are discussed (i) life as
opportunity, (2) that aim of education which will make it
possible to use this opportunity aright, and (3) the institutions
of education which, as environment, contribute to the un-
folding and instruction of the child. Part II. deals with the
teacher in relation to his work as a quickener, and then passes
to the teacher's preparation, his relation to the Bible, and last
and best his relation to the child. Part III. deals with the
young being in all stages of his growth from birth to adult
life, first taking up the broad question of man's place in nature,
and dealing with that as fundamental to all further interpre-
tation. The other topics concern themselves with man's
reaction on environment, with the development of the mental
powers and the placing of these in due relation to each other,
with the training of the child's faith, with the specific con-
sideration of the boy's and girl's experiences to adult life, and
with the rounded life.
New York— 0. P. PUTNAM'S SONS— London
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